EXPERIMENTER – Michael Almereyda’s New Film Opens in Toronto & On Demand

Lingers and haunts. – Variety

A forceful yet intimate performance…conceptually exciting, intellectually searching… – New York Times

TORONTO – Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter will electrify Canadian audiences this fall from Video Services Corp., starting the October 16 weekend at Carlton Cinema, On Demand and on iTunes and in Saskatoon, November 20, 2015.

The film was an official selection of the 2015 Sundance, New York, Vancouver, Calgary as well as the Fantasia Film Festival’s, respectively.

It’s a provocative, audacious take on the true and highly controversial experiment that upset a nation, Experimenter is a bracing portrait of a brilliant man whose troubling insights into human brutality are as important in today’s climate as they ever were.

Peter Sarsgaard masterfully takes on the mantle of famed psychologist Stanley Milgram. At Yale University in 1961, he designed the ‘obedience experiments,’ which observed the responses of ordinary people asked to send harmful electric shocks to a stranger. Despite pleadings from the person they were shocking, 65 percent of subjects obeyed commands from a lab-coated authority figure to deliver potentially fatal currents.

With the infamous Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial unfolding on TV sets across America, Milgram’s experiment ignited his peers, and he was branded as a manipulative monster. But Milgram, a Jewish man whose parents escaped Europe during the 1940s, is a man personally tormented by the Holocaust and the darkness of human nature.

Auteur Almereyda (Hamlet, Nadja, Cymbeline) brings a striking and sometimes playful take to this grave subject matter, boldly deploying voice-over and rear-screen projection as he invites us inside Milgram’s whirring, complex mind.

Check out more info at the film’s website

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