Ink Is Danny Boyle’s Best Film in Decades

Early on in Ink, Danny Boyle’s electrifying adaptation of James Graham’s award-winning 2017 play, a young Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) invites his new protégé, Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), soon-to-be editor of England’s notorious The Sun newspaper, to put his hands to the asphalt of Fleet Street and feel London’s printing presses roaring to life. As the two men kneel down on the wet pavement, St. Paul’s Cathedral glows behind them. The year is 1969, but this being a Danny Boyle film, the accompanying needle-drop is “Something’s Gonna Happen,” a propulsive 2025 song from the Irish garage punk band Sprints: “Push, push me, me hard / Watch me, I’ll go far.” It’s a moment suspended in time that nevertheless informs the future: a christening and a curse.

Goddamn it, Danny Boyle is so good at this. Ink, produced by Netflix and set to be released theatrically on December 11, is opening this year’s Venice Film Festival, and it’s a perfect kickoff. Graham’s play, about the early years of Murdoch’s ownership of The Sun, was already quite stylized, but Boyle (working from a script by Graham himself) takes a tale steeped in the minutiae of the English newspaper business and turns it into something anthemic and fearsome: Citizen Kane by way of Trainspotting. The music churns, the camera flies, flashes of the past and the future intrude alongside visions of events that may or may not be real. We feel the excitement of these characters, but we also sense that they’re gleefully opening the gates to hell.

This Murdoch is a bomb-throwing tycoon, an Aussie outsider sneered at by industry elites, who hires the talented Yorkshireman Lamb, a child of working-class parents, because he recognizes a similar resentment in him. The Sun is a laughingstock paper, soon to be labeled “Rupert’s shit sheet,” but Murdoch wants to turn it into a competitor for the best-selling Mirror. “I believe in the value of the news,” he tells Lamb. “It’s in my blood. That doesn’t mean it can’t entertain as well as educate.” We know where this ends, of course — entertainment and gratification at any cost, and to hell with education or information. As Murdoch, Pearce is convincingly calculating, but he also lets through just enough of the inner rage that clearly inspired the man. O’Connell is boyish, enthusiastic, both worried and excited about the opportunity he’s been given. We fear for his soul, and so does he, but that glint in his eye tells us the war has already been lost.

Ink follows the notoriously eventful early days of Lamb’s stewardship of The Sun, first as he puts together a team of awkward misfits and other cast-offs (“I should warn you, I’m very particular and people don’t like me,” one new hire informs him, to which Lamb replies, without missing a beat, “You’ll fit right in”), and then as he turns the paper into a sensationalistic, pandering, vulgar rag that wound up transforming the media business and the world forever. Among his hires is Jules Davies (a very good Claire Foy), who becomes the paper’s women’s editor and occasionally serves as Lamb’s conscience, though she also happens to be his mistress. (The character is, it should be noted, a composite of several different people.)

Graham has described the story of Murdoch and Lamb as a Mephistophelean one, but it’s also a Frankenstein tale, albeit a circular variation, in which the Doctor makes the Monster and then the Monster remakes the Doctor. Murdoch teaches Lamb to toss out the rules governing propriety, truth, and good taste — but when he later comes to Lamb and protests the direction things have gone in, he’s trapped. Yes, now The Sun is publishing nudity and interfering with police investigations and doing all sorts of nefarious things, but circulation is going through the roof. Murdoch has become a member of the Establishment, an example of the very hypocrites whom he once saw as his mortal enemies.

Does the movie go too easy on the man who eventually gave us Fox News and decades of ghastly politics? Is there something unbecoming about casting the still-hunky Guy Pearce to play Rupert Murdoch? Some will surely complain, but I found Boyle’s refusal to indulge in overt score-settling refreshing. (See 2024’s The Apprentice for an example of how not to handle this sort of material.) Instead, in trying to explain what made both Murdoch and Lamb tick in those early days, Boyle and Graham show us just how intoxicating and corrupting this kind of success can be. Ink is more akin to Wolf of Wall Street in the way it allows us to feel the excitement that drives the damned. And while it doesn’t go for overt condemnation, the film makes it abundantly clear that the events it depicts ultimately gave birth to the solipsistic, techno-feudal morass of our present moment. It’ll infuriate many, but it might also be a masterpiece.

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