Every Psychology 101 course covers the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, designed by Dr. Philip Zimbardo as a study of authority and the effects of institutional depersonalization, which ended in chaos after six days. In his third film, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez explores the real events in a docudrama that resolutely sticks to the facts. With the audience fully aware of the order of events and the ultimate outcome, our focus is on the harrowing personal experiences of the participants. Billy Crudup’s staid performance as Zimbardo lays the groundwork for the likes of Ezra Miller, Michael Angarano and Tye Sheridan to embrace their meaty roles.
The experiment was simple enough to set up: Zimbardo created a makeshift prison in the basement of a Stanford University building, using a hallway with several empty offices as a cell block and a broom closet as a solitary confinement unit. Zimbardo and his aides screened potential subjects, who were enticed by the prospect of $15 per day for two weeks, and ultimately divided them into groups of inmates and guards with a coin-flip. As the film shows, once the experiment was underway, Zimbardo’s first obstacle was to make his participants commit to their roles rather than simply go through the motions.
As the experiment plays out, two characters are key to its success (or failure, depending on how you view the proceedings). Prisoner 8612 (Miller) shows a tendency to rile everyone else up, even in simply voicing what they all know – that this is just an experiment. His resistance to playing the role of prisoner is equally met by a guard nicknamed John Wayne (Angarano) who goes full-on Cool Hand Luke and embraces the brutality of his temporary post. Whereas John Wayne starts off playacting, 8612 puts up no such shield to rebuff the guard’s sadistic prison rituals. Miller’s performance mines the character’s vulnerability and unleashes an anxiety-induced ferocity on the piece.
Alvarez and writer Tim Talbott give the film a clinical and claustrophobic tone. The score is sparse but ominous throughout, and the subtle use of handheld cameras expertly connect the audience with the prisoners’ disorientated state. The set and costume designs revel in the ’70s period, but the bulk of the film hinges on the dingy basement cell block. Even as the script lifts whole sequences of actions and dialogue from the actual tapes recorded during the experiment, it can feel like a beat for beat rehash of the real footage. But what Alvarez avoids is impressing his own interpretation of events on the audience. Resisting that temptation to editorialize, Alvarez instead provides a summary of events that values the prisoners’ emotional trauma (which would lead them to believe they were actually convicts serving time after only six days) over variables and Zimbardo’s questionable neutrality in the experiment.
The Stanford Prison Experiment seems a surprising turn for Alvarez, whose previous films Easier With Practice and C.O.G. don’t come close to the visceral experience of watching a makeshift prison filled with ordinary college students devolve into a hell-hole of abuse and abasement. The film first heaps on the unsettling reality of incarceration through Miller and Angarano’s performances, but after Miller’s departure the film is left with a hole that is never filled. Sheridan introduces paranoia and the willingness to surrender fundamental rights into the story’s latter half, but the film becomes too repetitive and peters out before the finale. Alvarez may resist commenting on the experiment itself, but his film will nevertheless contribute to the study’s ubiquity.