Experimenter

For his 1961 experiments at Yale University, psychologist Stanley Milgram set up volunteers in a small room where they were told to administer a battery of questions to an unseen volunteer in the next room. “Teachers” were instructed to deliver an electric shock when “students” answered the questions incorrectly, and were directed to increase the intensity of the shock after each successive wrong answer, even if the person in the next room had stopped responding. What the “teachers” didn’t know at the time was that the “students” were actually in on the experiment. Director Michael Almereyda’s film, Experimenter, dramatizes Milgram’s social experiments with cinematic artifice that is so old-fashioned it becomes experimental itself.

Almereyda is no stranger to cinematic gimmicks; his atmospheric vampire movie Nadja (1994) was made entirely with a Fisher-Price camcorder that made grainy black and white video images. That was a failed experiment whose visual flair couldn’t make up for a lack of drama. Experimenter begins conventionally, even classically, with a keen sense of claustrophobic drama. Dressing both the cast and the set pieces in dark institutional blues, Almereyda sets up the visual authority of a police procedural to observe Milgram’s experiments in authority.

The film’s first act depicts the early stages of the experiment in a dry, stagy fashion. Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) did not expect his subjects to all go through with the full range of electric shocks, but the vast majority of them did. Still, many subjects were uneasy with their actions, and the actors who play these first volunteers (including Anthony Edwards and John Leguizamo) convey all the conflicted tension of their situation, which left them feeling guilty even after they learned that their “student” was actually unharmed. As such, the film calls into question the human willingness to submit to another’s will.

After a conventional start, the film takes a bold cinematic leap—backward. Almereyda uses rear-projected backgrounds for much of the film’s final hour, not simply in the typical shots of city streets passing behind a moving car, but of interiors. Black and white projections of drawing rooms and furniture serve as locations for actors who remain in color. Sarsgaard frequently breaks the fourth wall, stopping to talk to the camera about his personal and professional life. These are the simplest and most old-fashioned devices, but they work brilliantly, making us realize how much of what we see is in fact artifice. Rear-projection was common in old movies and television but conveyed a kind of reality even though they seem clearly illusory now; but it begs the question, was it any less of an illusion than the “realistic” locations and CGI we take for granted in movies today? The means by which Hollywood used to depict reality look positively dreamlike today, which is part of what makes the film so effective.

Experimenter is one of two films this year to dramatize a psychological experiment. More successfully than The Stanford Prison Experiment, Almereyda’s film resonates with a social media culture that seems more and more prone to groupthink. But the director is after more than just social commentary, and he gets it; he’s made a fascinating, provocative film about movies and illusion.