It took a very long time for The Stanford Prison Experiment to make its way to the screen. This version anyway. Based on real events of 1971, the story of the university psychology experiment has been the subject of documentaries and plays and has loosely inspired books and other dramatic films in these 44 years since. Actually, most of them came about in the last 15. You may feel like you’ve already seen this movie thanks to the existence of 2010’s The Experiment, which is an English-language remake of the 2001 German movie Das Experiment.
Despite the familiarity, though, The Stanford Prison Experiment debuted this year at Sundance to mostly positive reviews and received two awards at the festival. A lot of the reviews praise the discomfort viewers feel during the movie, as if the experiment is also on the audience watching the experiment unfolding in front of them. Well, we could say that any movie is an experiment involving the content on screen and the audience’s reaction to that content, but it’s a fairer, more appropriate idea with this one. Apparently it’s a good enough movie to be an exception to all these issues.
Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez (C.O.G.), The Stanford Prison Experiment stars Billy Crudup as Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who notoriously performed a controversial study where participants pretended to be either guards or prisoners in a simulation of prison life. The men taking part are younger here than in some previous versions. Michael Angarano leads the guard side, while future superhero movie stars Ezra Miller (Justice League) and Tye Sheridan (X-Men: Apocalypse) are notables on the prisoner end. Others include Keir Gilchrist, Jesse Carere and Thomas Mann, and Olivia Thirlby also co-stars as Crudup’s wife.
Here is the official synopsis via IFC Films:
What happens when a college psych study goes shockingly wrong? In this tense, psychological thriller based on the notorious true story, Billy Crudup stars as Stanford University professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who, in 1971, cast 24 student volunteers as prisoners and guards in a simulated jail to examine the source of abusive behavior in the prison system. The results astonished the world, as participants went from middle-class undergrads to drunk-with-power sadists and submissive victims in just a few days. Winner of two awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including Best Screenplay, and created with the close participation of Dr. Zimbardo himself, ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ is a chilling, edge-of-your-seat thriller about the dark side of power and the effects of imprisonment.
The Stanford Prison Experiment hits theaters and VOD on July 17th.
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