'Ink' TIFF review: Danny Boyle's hyperkinetic exploration of tabloid journalism
Courtesy of Netflix/TIFF
Bringing his usual flair for anarchy and punk-rock energy, director Danny Boyle turns the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire into something both intoxicating and dizzying in “Ink.” This is not quite the sweeping indictment one might expect of the man who would later build Fox News and help usher political discourse into its current age of outrage and misinformation. Boyle and screenwriter James Graham instead ask audiences to draw their own conclusions, laying out the machinery of Murdoch’s revolution without always passing judgment on the men operating it. That restraint can occasionally feel too generous, but it also allows the film to illustrate how seemingly small editorial compromises accumulated into something much larger. By the time Boyle arrives at one of the best closing montages in recent memory, the distance between where this story began and where the media ultimately ended up has all but disappeared.
Filled with the director’s familiar flourishes, including Steadicam shots, Dutch angles and hyper-fixated close-ups, “Ink” begins with Murdoch, played by Guy Pearce, purchasing the failing British newspaper The Sun in 1969. His ambition is to transform it into a populist force capable of challenging the country’s reigning newspaper, the Daily Mirror. Adapted from Graham’s 2017 stage play, the film traces how Murdoch recruited Yorkshire newspaperman Larry Lamb, played with ferocious velocity by Jack O’Connell, and gave him the freedom to create what would eventually become a tabloid behemoth. Although the story is rooted in a specific period of British journalism, Graham keeps his finger firmly on the pulse of the present, demonstrating how an editorial philosophy built around instinct, provocation and circulation would eventually become a blueprint for the modern attention economy.
Despite its eclectic energy and deliberately anachronistic soundtrack, “Ink” is not exactly the “Succession” of the newspaper business. Much of the film revolves around executives eating at establishments such as Rules and the Savoy Grill, smoking and drinking while negotiating the future of British journalism over dinner. The film begins with Murdoch offering Lamb complete creative authority to pull The Sun from oblivion and into the mainstream, with the agreement essentially sealed on a napkin. That informality becomes part of the danger. Decisions that will reshape public discourse are made with the casual confidence of men who are more interested in winning than contemplating what their victory might cost.
Lamb immediately begins recruiting top-tier talent, frequently poaching reporters from the Mirror to assemble a scrappy newsroom willing to disregard convention. In one of the film’s most exhilarating sequences, he asks his staff what ordinary people actually enjoy, prompting an increasingly uninhibited conversation about sex, violence, gossip and free giveaways. Lamb’s philosophy is simple: every story should unfold like a thriller, keeping readers on edge and returning for more at any cost. He even promises raises whenever certain provocative subjects make the front page, transforming sensationalism from an occasional tactic into an institutional mandate.
That approach also wins over some of Lamb’s skeptics, including former Mirror reporter Jules Davies, a fictional composite played with grit and intelligence by Claire Foy. Lamb gives Jules space to cover women’s issues with a frankness rarely afforded by mainstream newspapers of the period, allowing “Ink” to recognize that The Sun’s populism was not entirely regressive. Its willingness to speak directly to working-class readers could open conversations that the establishment ignored, including candid discussions of women’s bodies and sexuality.
The contradiction is that this apparent liberation is inseparable from exploitation. For every thoughtful attempt to address the female experience, there is another salacious feature designed to sell copies. Boyle understands that The Sun’s most consequential innovation was not simply introducing more sex or scandal into the newspaper. It was learning that progressive ideas, prurient curiosity and genuine human suffering could all be packaged according to the same standard: whether they captured attention. Once circulation becomes the only meaningful measure of success, every moral boundary starts to look negotiable.
Those consequences became impossible to ignore with the 1969 kidnapping of Muriel McKay, the wife of Murdoch executive Alick McKay. Her abductors mistakenly believed she was Murdoch’s wife, targeting her partly because of the hostility inspired by the kind of newspaper he was building. Lamb makes the controversial decision to turn the investigation into an ongoing editorial campaign, believing that increased exposure might lead someone to identify the kidnappers. The results are grim, forcing the film to confront the question it has spent much of its running time avoiding: How far is too far when another person’s tragedy can be converted into tomorrow’s headline?
The McKay storyline represents a severe tonal shift from the blackly comic account of The Sun’s transformation that precedes it. Boyle devotes considerable time to the case, and its weight temporarily stalls the propulsive momentum he has worked so hard to establish. Yet that disruption also feels necessary. A movie this enamored with the speed and ingenuity of Lamb’s newsroom needs to stop long enough to consider the damage left behind by its momentum. The problem is that “Ink” does not fully reconcile these competing modes. It dramatizes the consequences of sensationalism with genuine gravity, only to return to the newsroom’s escalating provocations, including the introduction of the Page 3 model, without sufficiently exploring what its characters have learned, if anything.
That unresolved tension makes it difficult to determine whether the McKay kidnapping is intended as the moment when the ideological seeds of Murdoch’s future empire are planted or simply another boundary that The Sun discovers it can cross without losing readers. The film is ultimately less cynical than its wild opening passages suggest, and perhaps more reluctant than it should be to connect Murdoch’s methods directly to the media ecosystem they helped create. Boyle shows us the invention of outrage as a business model, but he remains more fascinated by the people building the machine than furious about what the machine would eventually do.
What carries “Ink” through those reservations is its trio of formidable performances. Pearce gives Murdoch a quiet, watchful authority, while Foy finds the intelligence and unease of a journalist recognizing both the opportunities and compromises within Lamb’s revolution. O’Connell, however, is the film’s live wire. He plays Lamb as a man moving faster than his conscience can keep up, driven by the intoxicating belief that changing journalism and improving it are the same thing. His performance captures the thrill of an outsider storming a closed institution as well as the recklessness of someone who measures every decision by whether it works. “Ink” may hesitate to deliver a definitive verdict on the empire Lamb and Murdoch built, but its final images leave little doubt about their legacy: they did not merely give people the news they wanted. They helped create a world in which keeping people angry, frightened and watching became more valuable than keeping them informed.
Grade: B+
INK played at the Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in U.S. theaters on December 11, 2026, before it begins streaming January 8, 2027.
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