Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
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.
Experimenter is a genuinely distinctive biographical drama that earns its novelty through bold formal choices — breaking the fourth wall, theatrical artifice, stylized sets — that mirror Milgram's own interrogation of performance and reality. The film's conception is singular and intellectually committed. The plot, however, struggles to sustain momentum beyond the experiment itself, becoming episodic and diffuse in its second half. Acting is solid if uneven — Peter Sarsgaard is cerebral and watchable, though the ensemble is inconsistent. Cinematography is competent and occasionally inventive but doesn't fully capitalize on the theatrical conceits. The ending deflates rather than resonates, offering a low-key coda that feels underpowered for the weight of the subject matter.