The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) is a tense psychological drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez. In the summer of 1971, a college basement in California gets rebuilt into mock cells. Two dozen young men flip a coin: half become inmates, the other half become guards.

Professor Philip Zimbardo, played by Billy Crudup, sets up a study meant to run two weeks and watches it unfold through hidden cameras. Nobody handed these students a script. The guards, fresh in uniform with wooden batons, grow cruel within days, while the prisoners, stripped of their names and given numbers, start to fall apart. The cast includes Ezra Miller, Tye Sheridan, Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby.

Built from the recordings and testimony of the people who actually took part, the film almost never leaves those four walls, and the pressure builds on its own. The tagline promised two weeks; it lasted six days. It is a hard look at how a role and a uniform can rewire an ordinary person. Stream The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) online on iFILM.