How did we arrive at our current, deeply toxic tabloid media landscape? That is the question at the centre of , the pulsing new drama from Danny Boyle, which just opened the Venice Film Festival. Adapted by James Graham from his zippy 2017 play of the same name, it’s a period piece which feels bitingly contemporary: the tale of Australian upstart Rupert Murdoch’s purchase and rebranding of newspaper in 1969, a turning of the cultural tide which would change journalism forever. It’s a story which felt horrifyingly relevant a decade ago, but now, as it leaps from stage to screen, it’s more scalding and resonant than ever before.
It’s not Murdoch himself (played here by his fellow Australian, Guy Pearce) who is at the forefront of this story, though, but Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), a Yorkshire-born, Manchester-based, self-proclaimed “newsman”, with whom the future mogul dines in the film’s opening scene. Rupert, bored of being the butt of Antipodean jokes and looking to make a splash on Fleet Street, has bought the then-failing daily . He just needs a flashy new editor to take the helm and shake things up. The straight-laced Lamb isn’t sure that he’s his man – Murdoch is after a storyteller, an entertainer, rather than a consummate journalist. But the pay – a figure written on a napkin and discreetly passed over – is high. This, he realises, is an offer he can’t refuse.
From here, jets forward like a rocket: there’s an almost -style sequence in which Lamb poaches disgruntled hacks from rival papers, assembling a shaggy, eclectic dream team. Among them is Jules (Claire Foy), Larry’s longtime friend and sometime lover, who takes over the women’s pages. Others come in to cover crime, sport, horoscopes – the goal for is to distinguish itself from its competitors, particularly the seemingly high-brow , then the most widely read paper in the country. In place of its thorough coverage of global crises and mission of moral betterment for its readers – a notion which now feels hilariously quaint – Murdoch and Lamb want to present something more audacious and egalitarian; something, as Rupert puts it, “loud, dangerous and fun.”
This movie is all of those things, niftily weaving together big laughs and a kind of knees-up rambunctiousness with the skin-crawling realisation of what we know is coming. As this news team tests the boundaries of what’s possible to print, the boat is pushed out further and further until it’s no longer visible. Murdoch and Lamb butt heads – but both ultimately agree that the bottom line is all that matters. A frantic race to the bottom commences, and the public lap up every last drop.
There’s sometimes a clumsy heavy-handedness in ’s explorations of its central themes. (The end credits are a prime example, crudely hammering home the connections to our turbulent, disinformation-filled present, when all of that is surely evident to everyone from the jump.) It’s also frequently silly, melodramatic and overly earnest. But, all of this is possible to forgive, because in its bones, it’s never less than riotously entertaining.
As to be expected from the adaptation of a play, a certain talkiness persists, but in Boyle’s characteristically frenetic hands, in a flurry of montages and time jumps and wildly spinning cameras, it all feels breathlessly kinetic. Some choices don’t quite land – the tilting shots in the first set piece eventually gave me motion sickness – but there’s no denying the rowdy energy it brings to a film which could otherwise easily have been a staid, sombre, by-the-book newsroom saga.
Boyle also takes endless pleasure in the nostalgic trappings of this media heyday. In one early moment, Lamb tells Murdoch to press his hands down on the Fleet Street tarmac to feel the radiating heat of the printers whirling into action under their feet. That sense of wonder at the mechanics of this age-old industry, and the jolting, anxiety-inducing, euphoric frenzy of navigating a newsroom, pervade the rest of . You’re left to revel in the cigarette smoke-filled offices, clacking typewriters, casual pill popping and sordid Christmas parties, all set to a pumping, head-banging soundtrack.
O’Connell, slippery and enigmatic, as he slides up the greasy pole, shedding his integrity bit by bit, gets the most airtime, certainly, but Pearce is equally fascinating. Tetchy and conflicted, his Murdoch swings from laissez-faire brashness to boyish embarrassment when he believes Larry has taken things just a little too far. Even he, the mastermind of this entire enterprise, is not fully in control of the monster he has so gleefully created.
Also of note is Foy, in a part newly written for the film and described in press materials as a fictional amalgamation of a number of Fleet Street women. Despite this, the actor manages to bring an impressive degree of specificity to Jules, a no-nonsense, hard-as-nails editor, prone to a bit of casual racism and flexible in her ethics, who follows Larry down his rabbit hole, but only understands the need to turn back around when it’s far too late.
In many ways, feels like a movie that could have been made decades ago, but it’s also one which is especially pertinent right now – a rollicking good time which winkingly holds up a mirror to our basest instincts. It isn’t quite or All the President’s Men, but this is a valuable addition to the newsroom canon, regardless.
Ink will be in cinemas from 8 January 2027.