Experimenter (2015)

The premise serves as a malleable metaphor for just about any racial anxiety you please: the white coopting of black cool, cited as one of the reasons for the Armitages’ selection of exclusively black targets; the ongoing use of unwilling black bodies to perform white labor from plantation to penitentiary; and the pressures of conformity borne by the blacks living among white affluence—it’s explained that the black “vessels” don’t wholly lose consciousness once occupied by their new white hosts, and are condemned to an existence acting as mute observers of their servility, a situation dramatized in a scene with housekeeper Betty Gabriel (also a standout in the ensemble of Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter ), who begins uncontrollably leaking tears while keeping up the front of a pristine smile, the despondency of a prisoner begging to be put of their misery clearly visible behind her wet eyes.