Dr. Frank Olson

Frank Olson is a soft-spoken Army scientist working on biological and chemical weapons research at Fort Detrick in the early 1950s. Devoted to his wife and children, he is thoughtful, principled, and increasingly uneasy about the ethical weight of his classified work. As the story opens, he is a man quietly wrestling with his conscience.

Peter Sarsgaard plays Olson with a stillness that feels like restraint rather than blankness — every silence suggests something churning underneath. Errol Morris's docudrama format asks him to be both an intimate husband and an enigma refracted through decades of official denial, and Sarsgaard holds both without tipping into melodrama, making Olson's decency the film's quiet anchor.