Danny Boyle presents us with a lurid, violent and thumpingly unsubtle movie full of Dutch angles, cartoony shocks and gargoyle closeups. It’s a chapter in the prehistory of modern media, adapted by James Graham from his 2017 stage play, filled with shame and fear and self-hate. It is in fact the story of the Sun newspaper, and how Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) bought the ailing minor title in the late 60s and hired a tough Yorkshire newspaperman, Larry Lamb, to turn it into a raucous and gleefully vulgar circulation powerhouse.
Ink summons up the energy and frenzy of tabloid papers of the era, but also – and not entirely intentionally – how strangely depressing they were. Audiences used to the super-rich anomie of the Roy family from TV’s Succession might find all this very unsexy. This is a world of officer-class Fleet Street execs having expense-account meals at Rules and the Savoy Grill in pinstripe suits, smoking and drinking and impassively writing salary offers on paper napkins and silently passing them across to each other. Meanwhile, the other ranks of journalists and print unions are covered in sweat and ink.
Murdoch and Lamb had something to prove: both wanted to take a slap at the establishment club that had until that moment kept them out. Jack O’Connell is excellent casting as Lamb; muscular and pugnacious as a working-class reporter made good. Pearce is less of a panto monster than you might expect; in fact, he is increasingly squeamish and fastidious at the rude ideas that Lamb keeps coming up with for the paper – even if the Page 3 girls were not immediately introduced. It’s a coolly composed performance, though the traditional question of what makes Murdoch tick is incuriously passed over; again, this suffers in comparison with Brian Cox’s Logan Roy in Succession. Claire Foy plays the fictional-composite figure of Jules, a kind of young Marjorie Proops women’s-page editor powerless to stop the coming tide of sexism.
Yet this is a film with a story-within-a-story to tell, about a truly horrifying true-crime nightmare (in this way, oddly reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low), an event which perhaps deserves a film of its own. In 1969, Muriel McKay (played here by Lucy Russell), the wife of Murdoch executive Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde), was kidnapped by people who thought she was Murdoch’s wife Anna; it was a chaotic and incompetent abduction that resulted in the death of Muriel McKay, whose body was never found.
The film is perhaps unsure exactly how much prominence to give this horrible affair in the midst of the bleary, knowing and lenient black comedy that governs everything else. Was the McKay kidnapping a terrible karmic judgment on the Murdoch group and the Sun itself, that did so much to promote materialism and celebrity obsession? (The kidnappers were reputedly inspired by Murdoch’s appearance on TV.) Maybe. Boyle’s movie imagines Lamb unrepentantly running sensational stories about the kidnapping – as he never would have dared if the victim was actually Anna Murdoch – on the grounds that a reader might have important information to give the police. And then, after the tragic outcome becomes clear, he rejects guilt and doubles down on Sun-sationalism and introduces Page 3 girls.
So was the McKay kidnapping the primal scene of media degradation, the seed that led to Fox News, Trumpism and the social media manosphere? Again, maybe; but perhaps the kidnapping should occupy a more central dramatic position if the film is not to appear cynical and detached in the way that the Sun was accused of being. Either way, it’s a resoundingly tough and confident performance from O’Connell.
• Ink screened at the Venice film festival; it is in cinemas on 11 December in the US, 7 January in Australia and 8 January in the UK
