Experimenter

Sometimes a single experiment can simultaneously reveal to us both the possibility of our collective bright future and the unmitigated face of evil. This inventive and playful biography of social psychologist Stanley Milgram gets to the heart of this paradox by revisiting his famous obedience experiments, in which people were made to believe they were administering electric shocks to others in order to test why people will cede to authority, no matter how brutal the request.
EXPERIMENTER explores a big question, especially relevant in today’s social media scramble: how far is too far when we want to collect useful data on human behavior? Although the specter of the Holocaust and the insistence of Nazi concentration camp guards that they were “just following orders” shadows the film’s central theme, iconoclastic genius Michael Almereyda keeps things lively and formally interesting throughout, with much wry direct-to-camera address, a tender if fraught portrait of the scientist’s home life (featuring a riveting Winona Ryder) and a palpable sense of 60’s period values and design. EXPERIMENTER is anchored by Peter Sarsgaard’s magnificent performance, on screen virtually every moment of the film, as Milgram. (Noah Cowan)