Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 draws its name from George Orwell’s chilly formulation of totalitarian logic: the acceptance of the patently untrue in the spirit of “doublethink”. For Peck this idea resonates urgently in a contemporary political landscape deformed by populism, digital media and the erosion of shared reality.
The film attempts both an in-depth portrait of the late author and a scattershot meditation on the persistence of his ideas.
Structured around Orwell’s ailing, final years on the Scottish island of Jura as he completed his classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the documentary draws on letters and essays, convincingly read by Damian Lewis, to trace his evolution from imperial policeman in (then) Burma to fallen socialist and stringent critic of power.
Peck situates Orwell’s work within broader political currents, linking his insights on propaganda, language and control to present-day figures – from George W Bush to Xi Jinping – and systems of influence.
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The film is ambitious in scope, incorporating archive footage, literary excerpts and clips from adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the CIA-backed Animal Farm, bolstered by references to modern media ecosystems and economic inequality. Contemporary commentators and historical v oices underscore the relevance of Orwell’s warnings about manipulation and ideological control.
This breadth proves double-edged for the master craftsman behind documentaries such as I Am Not Your Negro and Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. The film often feels cluttered and overlong, shifting clumsily between biography, analysis and polemic.
More damningly, Peck’s embrace of Orwell as a hero sidesteps the eventual declassification, in 2003, of the British Foreign Office’s file FO 111/189, the contents of which suggested that Orwell the anti-authoritarian was a carefully constructed persona.
In 1949 the author gave a list of suspected communists to the foreign office’s covert propaganda unit, naming Charlie Chaplin, Michael Redgrave and JB Priestley, among others. In his diaries he denounced Cecil Day-Lewis, Katharine Hepburn, George Bernard Shaw and others, using such loaded epithets as “tendency to homosexuality”, “very anti-white” and “Jew”.
No intolerant informer should be as unambiguously lionised as Orwell is here.
In cinemas from Friday, March 27th
