Experimenter

2015 "Illusion sets the stage. Deception reveals the truth."
6.6| 1h37m| PG-13| en| More Info
Released: 16 October 2015 Released
Producted By: FJ Productions
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://experimentermovie.com/
Info

Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram designs a psychology experiment that still resonates to this day, in which people think they’re delivering painful electric shocks to an affable stranger strapped into a chair in another room. Despite his pleads for mercy, the majority of subjects don’t stop the experiment, administering what they think is a near-fatal electric shock, simply because they’ve been told to do so. With Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community with his exploration into people’s tendency to comply with authority. Celebrated in some circles, he is also accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster, but his wife Sasha stands by him through it all.

Genre

Drama, History

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Experimenter (2015) is now streaming with subscription on Prime Video

Director

Michael Almereyda

Production Companies

FJ Productions

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Experimenter Audience Reviews

More Review
Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!
filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
davidg4441 Gripping study. Explains my own thoughts of Nazi Germany.
Matthew Spach First off, Dr. Milgram's work is a great subject for a film and left the door open for a million ways for this story to be told. The positive side: It's a well-cast rendition which covers the basic points in the man's life. For someone who has never read about his work, I think it's a great introduction. The performances are not bad, but I think as a result of a weak script, the action plays out in a very dry and unemotional way. Stylistic decisions (such as direct address of the audience by the title character in almost every scene) make it very hard to take this film seriously or to have any real response. Many moments in the film seem to be reenactments done as snippets of a bad documentary on Milgram, where others hit right on the dot.All in all they tried to cover too much material for one film and should have found something more specific to focus on. They style cinematography, direct address of camera, and moments of green-screened action on black and white backgrounds, make the film very hard to suspend disbelief. It was nice to see someone attempt a style outside the Hollywood formula, but sadly this one didn't choose the right methods of experimentation.
brando647 I have loved psychology since high school and often wish I had pursued a career in the field, but I didn't so I have to get my fix elsewhere. We were lucky to have received two movies focused on the subject of famous psychological experiments last year (EXPERIMENTER and THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT) and, while I was more interested in a dramatization of the Stanford experiment, my local stores only carried the other. EXPERIMENTER is a strange little docudrama that details the work of Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), most prominently his experiment on obedience. For those unfamiliar, the subject of the experiment would act as the "teacher" and ask a series of memory questions to the "student". Interacting in separate rooms via a one-way intercom, the teacher would be commanded to shock the student with increasing voltage for every wrong answer until the student (a member of Milgram's team) is heard grunting in pain, demanding the experiment be halted, and eventually goes silent. Milgram's goal was to see how many people would continue the experiment knowing they are causing pain to an innocent subject and how far people would allow the voltage to climb before refusing to continue. The results of his experiment were considered shocking and the whole event remains controversial; EXPERIMENTER delves into Milgram's views on the importance of the results, the question of whether his experiment was ethically sound, and how this one experiment continued to resonate throughout his career until his eventual death late in 1984.EXPERIMENTER is a film for a niche audience and I can see most people either bored or put off by director Michael Almereyda's creative choices. Psychology is a hard topic to make too exciting. Interesting, sure, but not exciting. The most drama you find in the film comes from the negative reactions to Milgram's experiment. We're treated to a trio of women being given the chance to confront Milgram after the fact where they can voice the psychological concerns of participants deceived into thinking they are harming another human being, and we see Milgram lose out on tenure at Harvard because the professional world didn't respond much better to what his experiment said on human nature. For me, all that was the interesting stuff. About halfway through the movie, we shift gears to focus on some of Milgram's other, less controversial experiments. It's all mildly interesting and serves to show that Milgram wasn't completely about exposing mankind's less popular features but I was hoping we'd get more drama from the obedience experiment and the aftermath. I suppose there might not have been enough material for such interesting dramatic piece and maybe we got a glimpse at the worst of it. We did get a fun visit with Milgram to the set of the TV movie "The Tenth Level" where William Shatner (Kellan Lutz) and Ossie Davis (Dennis Haysbert) are recreating the experiment in true '70s cheese fashion. It's all somewhat intriguing but the movie does lose a lot of steam.Apparently some elements of Almereyda's film were met with laughter when touring the festival circuit. You see, he's incorporated some weird visual elements that feel completely out of place. It all starts when we see Milgram's first monologue to the audience as he walks down the hall outside his experiment room, and an elephant comes around the corner and shambles up behind him. I assume it's some "elephant in the room" visual metaphor but I honestly didn't know what it was meant to tell me. It seemed to me that the character of Milgram was completely frank with the audience (and everyone in the film) and that there weren't any issues left unaddressed. Then we have bizarre uses of background projection (not just for driving scenes…an entire afternoon tea scene is set in front of a weird background projection) and a distractingly bad false beard Milgram acquires when we reach the late 70's or so. Why go weird? Why not play this as a straight drama? It started feeling like we were watching an odd stage play. A stage play with an admirable cast though. Sarsgaard does a fine job as MIlgram and we've got Winona Ryder as his wife Sasha. Comedian Jim Gaffigan has a minor role as the "student" in Milgram's team and his subjects have a steady stream of cool cameos including John Leguizamo and Anton Yelchin. As inexplicably strange as the movie is and despite the lull in the middle, EXPERIMENTER has enough positive notes to make it well worth a view for anyone interested in the subject matter.
MarcoLara I saw thing movie before I ever watched it, because I am very familiar with the work of Dr. Stanley Milgram. The actors were well chosen and some of the dialogs during the experiments are basically verbatim to what happened in real life. So kudos on that regard.But then there is that part that I completely missed and the movie brought it to life, and is the struggle or Dr. Milgram to perform his experiments and defend them in a society were we prefer to believe that we are the heroes in our own movies playing in our heads and the heads of the ones we socialize with. Dr. Milgram opened a window into who we really are and how easily we are wiling to cancel our better judgement. This is where this movie shines and this is why this movie is worth watching. And, if you have never heard of Dr. Milgram, then you will really enjoy this movie for his incredibly interesting experiments.Unfortunately, this movie runs a bit longer that it needed be. As this is not an action movie and there is little romance in it, and specially if you are familiar with Dr. Milgram's experiments, you will feel that the movie is boring. I felt that at times, and I wished for the movie to be some 20 minutes shorter.Still, it is a great movie, both for people familiar and unfamiliar with Dr. Milgram and his experiments. Note of caution, though: You may find there something about yourself that you may not like.