EXPERIMENTER (Michael Almereyda). 90 min. Opens Friday (October 16). Rating: NNNN
Where to watch: iTunes
Experimenter may lack the fireworks of this year’s other true-life psychological drama, The Stanford Prison Experiment, but that’s just fine. It simply takes a different route into the soul of its subject, one that’s no less effective.
Michael Almereyda’s dramatization of the life and work of Stanley Milgram – whose landmark experiments in the 60s explored the phenomenon of human obedience to authority figures – lets the psychologist (played as an affable intellectual by Peter Sarsgaard) tell his story directly to the camera, starting with his famous experiment and tracking its fallout through academia and popular culture.
Almereyda (Nadja, Cymbeline, Hamlet) filters the story through a subjective lens, playing with backgrounds and artifice. But he finds Experimenter’s heart in Milgram’s relationship with his wife, Sasha (Winona Ryder), whose perspective proves essential to our understanding of the man inside the lab coat.
