Magnolia Pictures has released the poster and trailer for Michael Almereyda's film Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard as infamous scientist Stanley Milgram, best known for the obedience trials that he conducted at Yale University in the 1960s. The film received the Sloan Commissioning Grant from the Sundance Institute in 2008 for the screenplay, in addition to a 2009 Sloan grant from Tribeca Film Institute's Filmmaker Fund.

Experimenter attempts to come to terms with Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, whose results remain unsettling, controversial, and relevant to this day. In addition to Sarsgaard as Milgram, the cast includes Winona Ryder, Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning, Anton Yelchin, Kellan Lutz, John Leguizamo, Anthony Edwards, and Dennis Haysbert. Here's the official synopsis:

In 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the "obedience experiments" at Yale University. The experiments observed the responses of ordinary people asked to send harmful electrical shocks to a stranger. Despite pleadings from the person they were shocking, 65 percent of subjects obeyed commands from a lab-coated authority figure to deliver potentially fatal currents. With Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram’s Kafkaesque results hit a nerve, and he was accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster. EXPERIMENTER invites us inside Milgram’s whirring mind, beginning with his obedience research and wending a path to uncover how inner obsessions and the times in which he lived shaped a parade of human behavior inquiries.

Take a look at the poster and trailer below, and check out Experimenter in theaters, iTunes, and on demand on October 16.