"Nobody will ever pay one penny to see that movie".
Those were my words after enduring Experimenter at Sundance earlier this year, and apparently I was as wrong as wrong can be. The film, the second at the festival to center on highly controversial psychological experiments, starred Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgrom, who used shock therapy to test how obedient to authority people could be. Remember the movie Compliance? Well, Milgrom studied the kinds of people who allowed that situation to get as far as it did.
On paper it's a potentially interesting premise, but the problem I had was that Milgrom simply isn't an intriguing figure. His experiment was, sure, but he was dull as toast, and sadly the movie is more about him than what he did. And some of the movie's problems can be glimpsed in the newly-released trailer, which also showcases the stellar supporting cast of Winona Ryder, Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Taryn Manning, Dennis Haysbert, and more. Here's the official synopsis:
In 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the "obedience experiments" at Yale University. The experiments observed the responses of ordinary people asked to send harmful electrical shocks to a stranger. Despite pleadings from the person they were shocking, 65 percent of subjects obeyed commands from a lab-coated authority figure to deliver potentially fatal currents. With Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram’s Kafkaesque results hit a nerve, and he was accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster. EXPERIMENTER invites us inside Milgram’s whirring mind, beginning with his obedience research and wending a path to uncover how inner obsessions and the times in which he lived shaped a parade of human behavior inquiries.
Experimenter hits theaters on October 15th.
