Based on the life of Stanley Milgram, Experimenter pokes and prods at the mind as the late social psychologist did in his controversial obedience experiments conducted at Yale in the 1960s. The reality-bending film stars the charismatic Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram, who intermittently addresses the camera directly, commenting on his unlikely life story as we watch it unfold. Milgram’s obedience experiments—which involved a subject administering electric shocks to a second volunteer—changed the landscape of social psychology, though Milgram’s career would suffer due to many of his colleagues disagreeing with the ethicality of the experiment. Odd, mesmerizing and wildly inventive, Experimenter is one of the most unique things you’ll see this fall.

We spoke to director Michael Almereyda about the film, which also stars Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, and Winona Ryder (as Milgram’s wife, Sasha).

Experimenter is out in theaters and VOD now.

How were you introduced to Milgram’s work?
It’s called Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It has transcripts from the experiments and a detailed account of its genesis and execution. It was very compelling to me and I thought it would make a good movie. The more I read and researched, I began to recognize there was a bigger scope than those experiments. His mind was reaching past those experiments, but they kept creeping up on him from the shadows.

How long ago was this?
2008. I’d heard of [the experiment] before, but not with attention or definition. I didn’t know how clever, rich and exhaustive it was. I didn’t know he worked on it for two years. I also didn’t realize the controversy and repercussions.

I like the way the movie slips between different planes of reality.
I’m grateful that you say that, but in some ways it’s a pretty straightforward movie. It’s pretty chronological, there’s one flashback, and otherwise it’s really broken into three sections. It’s more flexible than most movies because there’s a playful recognition that it is a movie and he can talk to the camera. That idea was part of the original thought I had for the movie, before House of Cards happened, but not before Ferris Bueller. Talking to the camera has been with us for a long time, but it felt appropriate that someone as self-conscious and self-confident as Milgram would do it. In fact, Milgram made a series of films in which he talked to the camera. Milgram was aware that reality shifts and we have different ways of interpreting things.

Talk about your use of rear-projection.
It was meant to reflect the way that a lot of situations in life are staged, that we’re constantly acting. There’s a level of reality that feels distanced from our more immediate experience. Going to see an old mentor with your new wife can be a play, almost. You’re dressing up and trying to be somebody bigger than you are. Throughout the movie, there are these elements of staged reality where I wanted to be candid about it and allow the audience to see that there’s an element of play and performance.

Peter is very likable in the movie, and I think that’s critical.
I hoped he’d be charming and compelling. I’d known him for a while, and the key to casting this role was that he had to be agile with language. You had to believe he could write a book. Peter’s a really good writer on his own, and I think he’ll be directing movies soon. The last shot of the movie was his idea, and it wasn’t in the script and it wasn’t meant to be the last shot. When we were shooting, he said, “It could be interesting if I tried to wave to Sasha but she doesn’t see me.” I was grateful for that and it ended up being a very poignant way to end the movie.

How did you decide which aspects of Milgram’s life outside of the experiments to show?
Almost nothing in the movie is made up. The biggest liberty I took was that he never visited the set of the made-for-TV movie. I simply took what I thought was compelling. I thought it was pretty organic and cohesive that one experiment led to another and they reflect back on each other and his own experience being a human in a city. We often have these barriers that are unspoken, and he tried to make us more aware of them.

You said you wanted to make the kind of movie Milgram would make himself.
I was trying not to make a plodding, literal-minded biopic. He was a talented filmmaker. He made two films that I think are truly wonderful films. One is called Obedience, which was shot during the last two days of the experiment. It’s very compelling and Roger Ebert called it one of the ten most important documentaries ever made. The other is The City and the Self, where he was roaming around New York with a camera, staging experiments. It’s a city portrait from the ’70s, a very lyrical documentary. In 1974, he was approached by a BBC crew to talk about the experiment and he was apparently so authoritative and compelling that they let him write his own movie [instead of being the subject]. It’s called We Do As We Are Told.

Talk about casting known actors in the roles of the subjects as opposed to more obscure names.
To me, they weren’t that well known. I wanted interesting people who were compelling. I wanted each role to have an impact. Part of the luxury of making a low-budget film is that I asked the best people I know if they had anything better to do, and they said yes. There’s another version of the movie where everyone is more anonymous, but I didn’t think it served the story any better.

I thought Jim Gaffigan was great.
He was an early choice. I didn’t know about him. I’d thought about Philip Seymour Hoffman, who I’d asked to be in about seven of my movies and who kept not being in my movies. He was actually signed, but he got a better offer. He looked like the real guy. Gaffigan was recommended and I started watching these Youtube clips and I was completely captivated by him.

Sasha Milgram is in the film. What did she think of it?
I think she liked it. She’s frail and she’s so supportive. I showed it to her at her house on DVD. What was touching was, at a certain point, when her character comes up she turns to me and says, “That’s Winona Ryder!” She was very excited. She’s great.

What do you think Stanley’s greatest fear was?
I think the real Stanley was probably more prideful than he is in my movie. But at the same time he’s smart and aware of his own foibles. There’s one quote of his I didn’t put in the movie that had something to do with that, to be a good social scientist, you have to have courage. I think, whatever fears he had, he was pretty good at mastering them.

To watch Experimenter is to subject yourself to a form of filmic mind manipulation, in which the movie’s central character, Stanley Milgram (played by a coolly cerebral Peter Sarsgaard), looks directly into the camera, at us, and seems to measure our reactions to his unlikely life story. It’s a strange, unsettling, but almost playful experience watching Sarsgaard watch us. It’s this mischievousness that makes the film, directed by Michael Almereyda, one of the more unique, oddly entertaining things you’ll find at the cinema this fall.

Milgram is  a real-life figure, a late, influential social psychologist whose most notable (notorious) work was a Yale experiment in which subjects would administer increasingly violent electric shocks. A volunteer is told that a fellow lab rat (Jim Gaffigan) is sitting on the other side of a wall, his fingers hooked up to the electric shock machine that’s under their command. The second volunteer plays a memory game, and for every wrong answer he receives a shock by their counterpart on the other side of the wall. In reality, the second “volunteer” is actually an actor and isn’t hooked up to anything (Gaffigan feigns wails of pain with each fake zap). Milgram’s interest is the subject’s behavior: How much punishment are the subjects be willing to inflict on another, innocent human being?

The results of this “obedience” test are alarming—65% continued administering shocks despite the man beyond the wall pleading with them to stop. The film shows a variety of test subjects, each played by famous character actors. Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Taryn Manning each play subjects and while their screen time is fleeting, they get their mini chamber stories across. Watching the inner turmoil bubble up in their facial expressions is mesmerizing and unsettling.

The intermittent moments when Milgram turns to us to comment on what we’re seeing are unforgettable not just because it’s visually, but because Sarsgaard is magnificent. As Milgram he’s calmly deceptive, as if the words coming out of his mouth are a cover-up for the ominous thoughts he’s processing behind his steely eyes. It’s easy to fall into a state of hypnosis as he slips his heady ideas underneath your eyelids and into the back of your mind.

Milgram’s ethicality comes into question when we learn that he rarely interacts with his subjects despite arguably putting them through a form of emotional torture. Surely he owes them the baseline courtesy of a personal interaction, or even a thank you. But no. He’d rather leech behavioral data from the volunteers and promptly kick them back to wherever they came from. His proclivity for emotional detachment starts to affect his personal life when his supportive wife, Sasha (Winona Ryder), starts to feel as shunned as his lab subjects. Milgram’s personal life is covered in a cursory way that wastes Ryder’s talents and makes his home life feel not just secondary, but disposable to the larger story. This bit of narrative negligence may be a fair reflection of Milgram’s state of mind at the time, but if this part of his life was so unimportant, why include it in the movie to this extent? At the very least, Ryder and Sarsgaard work very well together, and it definitely doesn’t hurt that they look good as a couple.

The movie’s disappointing final act is concerned with the fallout of the experiment and the devastating impact it had on Milgram’s reputation and career. Both Almereyda and Sarsgaard seem half as emphatic in depicting Milgram’s downfall as they are the movie’s strong front-end. Experimenter is gripping in that it allows us to spend time with this brilliantly realized character, an outcast who’s so out of touch with others that he only opens up completely to us, his imaginary friends. That’s when the movie works best, when we’re falling down the rabbit hole of Stanley’s mind. The movie’s imagery turns surreal, with literal elephants in the room trailing Stanley as he spouts his babble at us and rear-projected images that reflect the academic artifice that defines his personality. His behavior is more shocking than his poor subjects’. And yet, we want to be near him.

Two female-centric features took center stage for day 3 of MVFF, further bolstering the festival’s women-in-film initiative with female talent both in front of and behind the camera. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke was in attendance to present her new film Miss You Already, starring Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette. Also, making its world premiere at the festival was Valerie Weiss’ A Light Beneath Their Feet, starring Orange is the New Black‘s Taryn Manning. It feels like much of the excitement surrounding the festival can be attributed to this year’s strong female presence.

Best Friends For Real

Platonic love stories (particularly female ones) are seldom explored on the big screen for whatever reason, which makes Miss You Already feel fresh from the outset. Jess (Drew Barrymore) and Milly (Toni Collette) are longtime best friends living in the UK, the latter a posh, viciously self-centered socialite with a family, the former a soft-spoken housewife looking to start a family of her own. They’ve always done everything together, but when Milly is diagnosed with late-stage cancer, she falls violently out of sync not just with Jess, but with everyone around her. It’s a sweet friend-love story that never feels petty or sophomoric (like many male buddy movies tend to be) though the cutesy in-joke humor never clicked with me. Collette is ravishing, quick-witted, and tortured all at once, and Barrymore’s best moments are when she says nothing at all as she stares at her best friend with compassion and grace. It’s a solid, solid movie that should silence a few of Hardwicke’s critics.

Not Yet A Woman

In A Light Beneath Their Feet, Beth (Madison Davenport) is at the great crossroads of her life: She dreams of going to college thousands of miles away, but her bipolar mother (Taryn Manning) insists she stay and take care of her. Beth’s father, unable to cope with the difficulties of living with a mentally ill person, has been driven away and encourages her to follow her dream and leave her mother behind. There are some very good performances to be found here (Manning is in the prime of her career), but the story, while edgy by mainstream standards, never seems to push the boundaries or explore new territory we haven’t seen in similar pictures. A thread involving Beth pining for an outcast bad boy at school doesn’t take off either. With tempered expectations, however, A Light Beneath Their Feet is a well-told coming-of-age story that isn’t afraid to explore the darker side of teenage angst.

The name Stanley Milgram might not ring a bell for a lot of people, but his work as a social psychologist might. Milgram had a hand in creating some of the most fascinating social experiments in the 20th century (one of his experiments helped introduce the concept of “six degrees of separation), with his most famous study being the obedience experiments he conducted at Yale in the 1960s. His obedience experiments revealed a disturbing truth about society and people’s willingness to obey authority figures even if they don’t want to. Milgram helped expose a fundamental flaw in humanity’s own construction of itself, and even today some people turn a blind eye towards Milgram’s findings. Taking a cue from Milgram’s work, writer/director Michael Almereyda has crafted a brilliant biopic of Milgram with Experimenter, one that’s playful, enlightening and subversive from beginning to end.

Taking advantage of the fact that his subject spent a living experimenting with confronting societal norms, Almereyda continually messes around with the norms and structures of biopics and filmmaking in general. Milgram narrates and addresses the camera directly, frequently breaking the fourth wall and discussing his life with an omniscient tone, while the film frequently embraces artifice in its form: rear projection, theatrical sets, blending in documentary footage, asides detailing other social experiments from Milgram’s colleagues, and at one point making the term “elephant in the room” more literal than metaphorical. Almereyda’s direction is nothing short of brilliant here in the way it channels the spirit of Milgram into its own conception.

Peter Sarsgaard plays Milgram, and even he seems aware that this is his best role in years, relishing in his character’s charm and playfulness. Winona Ryder also does a great job playing Milgram’s wife Sasha, turning what could have easily been a thankless role into one that carries the film’s emotional weight. Both actors are part of a strong, eclectic ensemble (including John Leguizamo, Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning and Anton Yelchin), but this is really Almereyda and Sarsgaard’s show. It will be hard to imagine any other biopic topping Experimenter this year.