If the title MK Ultra means something to you already, you’ll know what this movie is about – the CIA’s MKUltra program, mind-control experiments on unwilling, ignorant or forced volunteers (soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes) using LSD and other drugs, often psychotics or psychedelics. There were various aims but one of them was the creation of the perfect soldier, one who would obey orders without thinking.
What’s odd and bold about writer/director Joseph Sorrentino’s fictionalised retelling of the story is how unsensational he makes it considering the historical facts – the experiments were entirely illegal and secret and only came to light in the 1970s. Sorrentino’s preamble tells us the program got up and running in the early 1960s, but a Wikipedia scan informs us that the MKUltra program was already running in 1953, and had been preceded by Project Artichoke, another program with the same goals.
Sorrentino was an intelligence agency guy and his take on the CIA is a refreshingly unglamourised one. The agents we meet in this sorry tale are short-haired guys in suits and horn-rim spectacles and are borderline psychopaths to a man.
But they dress and look almost exactly the same as this story’s hero, Ford Strauss (Anson Mount), a state psychiatrist who would like to experiment with therapeutic psychedelics with the aim of making lobotomy – the favoured fix for difficult cases – redundant.
Strauss cannot get a hearing from his fellow shrinks and so his theories remain theories until shadowy Galvin Morgan (Jason Patric) steps in, offering to fund the program as long as his agency – never named but it’s clearly the CIA – can have a look-see at the results.
Strauss sets up his experiments and chooses lab rats representative of aberrant human behaviour. Among them nymphomaniac Shelly (Jill Renner), lobotomised Brian (Harrison Stone), transgender Laura (Jen Richards) and schizophrenic Desmond (Tony Key). Each is given a dose of LSD. Each goes on a psychedelic trip in a bare hospital room, while on the other side of the glass Strauss takes notes with his nurse assistant (Wanetah Walmsley giving off the Nurse Ratched vibes). To one side silent CIA minder Townsend (Alon Aboutboul) films everything for his superiors.
LSD, woohoo, let’s go crazy. Unusually, Sorrentino resists the urge. There is no attempt to subjectify what Shelly, Brian, Laura, Desmond et al experience. While the guinea pigs get the visions, we get the clipboard and white coat. It’s all very clinical.
Using documentary footage, interviews and news reports of the time to add flavour, Sorrentino aim is to patiently and forensically follow this man of science and high ideals as his research is slowly but surely subverted by the CIA. The tail starts to wag the dog and Strauss eventually realises he is being hornswoggled.
Art mirrors life in a strange, late-stage volte-face when Strauss loses his cool and heads off for vigilante revenge, a development which denies the actors playing the patients their moment in the sun – it looked as if they and their mental progress were to be the focus of the drama, rather than some Liam Neeson late-onset payback.
Call it a rush of blood to the head, or a drug-fuelled episode, because the film is fine without the mad finale (though also enjoyable with it). Mount is excellent as Dr Strauss, a sober and dependable psychiatrist (albeit one with a liking for S&M bondage with his wife – another headscratching detail). Jason Patric is also excellent in what is an anti-Strauss role, as the sex-addict, drug-abusing shiftless Morgan. (Like Mount, Patric is much better now as an actor than he was when being maddened by lure of leading-man status 20 years ago.) Aboutboul is a presence who barely says a word but is a significantly unsettling presence all the same. Also giving off the vibes is Matt Nolan as the CIA’s down-table version of Dr Mengele.
It’s good, it’s dark. Scenes of the CIA guys being beastly with the patients can get a bit gruesome but on the whole this is an unusually detailed and sober report from the frontline of medical research… until it suddenly isn’t. MK Ultra takes a trip.
MK Ultra – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
