Two George Orwell docs for the price of one is the elevator pitch here. The first is a touching portrait of the Animal Farm writer’s life, looking backwards from his final TB-afflicted years and wholly constructed from his diaries and correspondences, delivered in a gravelly whisper by the actor Damian Lewis. The second doc, intercut throughout, is a relentlessly polemical film inspired by Orwell’s last book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The documentary’s director, Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, Exterminate All the Brutes) argues, with utter conviction, that we are currently living in a soulless Ingsoc world, a politically topsy-turvy place of totalitarian evils disguised as swiping, clicking, buying, spending and voting freedoms.

And so, with breathless urgency, Peck charges from the Spanish Civil War to the firebombing of Japan to the war in Iraq, the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, what Putin calls the “special operation” (the phrase is bleakly ridiculed) in Ukraine and the destruction in Gaza, all the while arguing that we have now reached a peak moment of Orwellian untruth. “To be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country,” Orwell warns ominously, via Lewis, on the soundtrack. The biographical material too is deftly handled: Peck’s stylistic masterstroke is to marry a constant audio wheeze that runs across the film, indicating Orwell’s faltering breaths, with the suggestion that this may also be the death rattle of western democracy. 

Elsewhere, in a project that took a full year to edit, with unfettered access to the Orwell estate’s entire archive, Peck proves impossibly adept at layering in seemingly disparate clips, quotes and footage without ever once losing sight of his central message. Much like Orwell, in fact, it’s the clarity of his polemic that impresses most.
★★★★☆
In cinemas

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