GFF: Experimenter

The biopic is turned on its head in this troubling but mischievously witty account of the real life experiments conducted by Dr Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) in the 1960s. Influenced by his experiences in WWII, Milgram asked participants to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to subjects they couldn’t see in order to determine how much someone would obey instruction, just because a person in a lab coat told them to. Detailing both the experiments and the outcry that followed, writer-director Michael Almereyda casts a probing eye on all of us, with a surreal bent and visual imagineering that recalls the films of Charlie Kaufman.

(film also screens Mon 22 Feb, 3:30pm)