AllMovie

The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment marked one of the most influential and hotly-debated behavioral science trials of the late 20th Century. During the said year, Stanford University psychologist-cum-professor Philip Zimbardo and several colleagues assembled a mock jail in the basement of one of the campus buildings, and hired some 24 undergraduate students to play the roles of both guards and inmates. The students adapted to their roles with extreme and terrifying results; those given guard status began to indulge in sadistic, tyrannical behavior, while those assigned prisoner status felt imposed-upon, dominated, and cruelly mistreated, and suffered from longstanding psychological issues as a result. The documentary Repetition witnesses not the original experiment, but a 2005 reworking of it in Warsaw, Poland, in which a Polish actor, Artur Zmijewski, attempted to recreate the 1971 endeavor note-for-note in a Polish sociocultural context.