Movie review: Experimenter

More than once in Michael Almereyda's playfully imaginative telling of the famous Stanley Milgram experiment, the film's subject walks through the corridors of Yale University musing direct to camera as an elephant lumbers by in the background.

As sly directorial winks go, it's may seem too showy and knowing but it effectively underlines the research's key message: that deception is often sustained by the tacit agreement of deceiver and deceived..

The 1961 experiment, one of psychology's most famous, assigned two randomly selected test subjects the roles of Teacher and Learner. Teacher would ask Learner (who sat, heard but unseen, in the next room) a series of multiple-choice questions.

For each incorrect answer, Teacher was instructed to administer a remote-controlled electric shock to Learner. Each shock was stronger than the last.

The trick (and the experiment's point) is that Learner is a member of Milgram's team. His escalating cries of pain are feigned and no real shock is being administered. Yet almost two-thirds of Teachers administered "shocks" they knew to be fatal.

That was the elephant: Milgram's experiment took place just as the trial was winding up in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer whose defence against charges of mass murder in the Holocaust was they he was merely following orders.

The film doesn't slap us around the face with the question: if anything, its formal artifice creates a portrait of the scientist-as-artist that is almost Brechtian in its detachment.

The result is a meaty film that misses the meat of its subject. It doesn't really grapple with its own ideas and is closer to a cinematic curio than a memorable movie.

It's notable for the presence of the little-seen Ryder as Milgram's wife, a character so odd that it has the ring of authenticity about it but as a whole it's a bit too studied to be engrossing.

Movie: Experimenter
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, Dennis Haysbert, Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning, Kellan Lutz, John Leguizamo
Director: Michael Almereyda
Rating: M (offensive language)
Running time: 98mins
Verdict: Long on style but frustratingly detached