Sundance Review: 'Experimenter' With Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, Anton Yelchin, And More

There have been two films at Sundance this year focusing on influential studies in social behavioral science and the resulting repercussions. Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s “Stanford Prison Experiment” (review here) looked at the studies of Dr. Philip Zimbardo, while “Experimenter” from director Michael  Almereyda examines Dr. Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment. While the experiment itself is fascinating, the approach taken by Almereyda in using distractingly peculiar storytelling techniques only succeed in distancing the audience from the film's inspiration.

The beginning of the film is fantastic, focusing on the process of the experiment itself in painstaking detail. Participants are led into a room and selected as teacher or student: the teacher is then told to administer electric shocks to the student (in another room) if the latter fails to answer questions right. A supervising scientist encourages the teachers to keep going, even when screams and...