Review of The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) by Matt C — 07 Aug 2015

The Stanford Prison Experiment is obviously not a movie made for entertainment purposes. It's dreary, grim, contained, and rather depressing in both its aesthetics and repetitiveness. In those respects, it succeeds.

It's not entertaining; it's intriguing and somewhat hypnotic in its slow pacing that forces the viewer into a dirty, endless barrage of superiority complexes and amoral psychologists. These statements may sound overwhelming negative and off-putting, but The Stanford Prison Experiment is strongly constructed with its visual style and pacing, and although it could have benefitted from more analysis of its subject, it's a solid movie with disturbing content that never crosses the line into exploitation.

The movie's biggest positive is probably Kyle Patrick Alvarez's direction. He does a great job projecting the blandness of the film's environment--almost all of it takes place within the makeshift prison--by using a ton of beiges and desaturated colors.

He also does a very good job at carrying the pace of the film, and although it's a very slow movie and is 121 minutes long, it's never boring. He's able to pique the audience's morbid curiosity of the material and keeps their attention with the system repetition and increasingly barbaric nature of the guards within the experiment.

There were times where I felt aware of the movie's slow pacing, but I wasn't ever annoyed or bored by it since it's so sure of itself and the actors all do good jobs at the least, and although they are purposefully interchangeable to an extent due to their dehumanization, actors like Ezra Miller and Thomas Mann find ways to inject character to their roles.

As for flaws, the movie doesn't have any real pervasive issues--the problems are more underlying. As stated before, I became aware of the movie's pacing because it's so slow. It was never bored, but I became aware of the director.

The movie also could have made more use of its subject matter, but it lacks a strong amount of analysis. I understand that it wants audiences to put the pieces together, but the movie feels a bit more detached with a bit of straightforward analysis tacked on at the end.

It really could have been insightful in terms of social psychological and humankind's naturally aggressive behavior, and it kind of dropped the ball on that respect. Regardless, the movie still presents a unique take on a true, infamous study from 1971 and suitably gives it nearly no room to breathe.

It's engaging but different in its approach, disturbing but not within bad taste, and will likely stick with the viewer to an extent. Audiences don't have to be extremely familiar with the experiment on which this is based--its simplicity works in its favor--but it doesn't feel like it's dumbing things down.

It may have a missed opportunity or two, but it's effective and well made. 7.8/10, solid, one thumb up, above average, etc.