Ask psychologists or behavioral scientists, and they’ll tell you that most ordinary people don’t set out to do unthinkably evil acts—but when they do, it’s usually due to a series of individual bad choices, each insignificant on its own but, when taken collectively, ultimately lead to disaster. This is the crucial truth some movies that try to dramatize inexplicable real-life events forget: Put any of us in the same situation and, under the right set of precise circumstances, we’d act just as monstrously.
Among the other laudable elements of The Stanford Prison Experiment, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez never, ever takes his eye off that reality, producing the rare film that explains humanity’s darkest behavior with such matter-of-fact clarity that it’s both chilling and illuminating. While watching The Stanford Prison Experiment, I was reminded of the line uttered by Max von Sydow’s dour philosopher in Hannah and Her Sisters when discussing the horrors of the Holocaust. “The reason why [intellectuals] could never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question,” he said in the Woody Allen movie. “Given what people are, the question is: ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’”
Alvarez’s film is based on the famous 1971 study that took place at Stanford University, wherein subjects were divided into “prisoners” and “guards” and given two weeks to enact their roles in the basement of one of the campus buildings, which was made up to resemble a jail. Bedlam ensued, with the study’s leader, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, forced to end the experiment after only six days.
Written by Tim Talbott and based on Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect, The Stanford Prison Experiment has a calm, queasy, clinical tone, the filmmakers hewing as closely to the actual events as they can. The approach works mostly superbly, Alvarez and Talbott largely resisting the urge to editorialize about the experiment or about Zimbardo himself. Instead, the film focuses on that series of bad decisions that turned a $15-a-day study into a crucible of cruelty and bullying.
Billy Crudup stars as Zimbardo with a stripped-down naturalness which suggests the man was neither an evil genius nor a total innocent. But the movie belongs to its younger actors, who play the prisoners and guards in Zimbardo’s jail simulation. In a prescreening interview early in the film, one of the potential subjects says, when asked if he’d prefer to be a prisoner or guard, that he’d rather be a prisoner because nobody likes guards. It’s a funny line in the moment, but The Stanford Prison Experiment soon twists that comment, showing that people may hate prison guards but we as individuals would quickly take to the job if it were assigned to us—and abuse our authority with alarming speed.
At first, the relationship between the study’s prisoners (including Ezra Miller and Tye Sheridan) and guards is friendly. Though they’re encouraged by Zimbardo and his associates to take the experiment seriously and to invest themselves fully in their roles, the subjects initially still understand that they’re not really in a prison. (And, besides, all the participants know that the guards are forbidden to strike the prisoners.)
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