Experimenter (film)
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Michael Almereyda |
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| Written by | Michael Almereyda |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Bryan Senti |
| Cinematography | Ryan Samul |
| Edited by | Kathryn J. Schubert |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Magnolia Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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98 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $128,465 |
Experimenter is a 2015 American biographical drama film written and directed by Michael Almereyda, based on the 1961 Milgram experiment. The film stars Peter Sarsgaard, Taryn Manning, Kellan Lutz, Winona Ryder, Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Lori Singer, Dennis Haysbert, Anthony Edwards, and Jim Gaffigan. The film was released on October 16, 2015, by Magnolia Pictures.
The film is based on the true story of famed social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who in 1961 conducted a series of radical behavior experiments at Yale University that tested the willingness of ordinary humans to obey an authority figure while administering electric shocks to strangers. In the first half of the film, it is shown how the experiments are conducted, with nearly every test subject succumbing to the pressure of the circumstances and administering shocks to a stranger, despite the stranger begging him to stop. Between the experiments, it is shown how Milgram meets Alexandra (or Sasha), who will become his wife and mother of two children.
The second half of the film shows how Milgram struggles with the public outcry about the ethics of the experiments and how his career advances as he becomes a professor in New York City and continues to study social interactions and social pressure in more benign experimental settings, including the small-world experiment, the lost-letter experiment, the street-corner (or gawking) experiment, the familiar stranger experiment, and various experiments that he makes his students carry out. Archive footage occurs frequently, either as recordings that Milgram watches or as a backdrop for entire scenes. Milgram finally dies from a heart attack, at the age of 51. In the final scene, the street-corner experiment is repeated in the present day, with a cameo of the real-life Sasha Milgram. In a mid-credits scene, more archival footage is shown.
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