‘Experiment’ lacks impact

Any movie titled “The Stanford Prison Experiment” has tension already built in. In the notorious experiment, which took place in August 1971, a Stanford professor named Philip Zimbardo re-created the conditions of a prison, casting 24 male students as prisoners and guards. The plan was to let the re-creation last for two weeks and watch the psychological effects on the students – but the experiment was scrapped after only six days, as the participants adopted their roles all too readily and became two warring factions, with the guards sadistically torturing the prisoners.

That said, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s drama doesn’t quite have the impact you’d think it would.

The tone set by Alvarez is repetitive; intentionally so, but in such a way that the film feels long, and the most disturbing parts of the experiment seem to lose impact. The students, dressed in the uniforms of guards and prisoners, often feel interchangeable; though a few (notably Ezra Miller’s haunted, desperate prisoner and Michael Angarano’s ice-in-his-veins guard) stand out.

But as the experiment goes on, and Zimbardo (Billy Crudup) begins to realize that something is terribly wrong, “The Stanford Prison Experiment” becomes increasingly claustrophobic, pulling a horrified viewer in. Crudup plays the character as coolly caught up in his creation; a Dr. Frankenstein gazing at his monster, unable to kill it.

It leaves its mark, not so much because of the filmmaking but because of the questions it raises. A former guard, at the end, asks what we’ll all leave wondering: “If you were in my position, what would you have done?”