‘Orwell: 2+2=5’ review: Raoul Peck links the writer, thinker and activist to the Orwellian present day

Dir. Raoul Peck. US/France 2025. 119mins

The British writer Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell (1903-1950), devised the formula ‘2+2=5’ to encapsulate the ways in which totalitarianism coerces its subjects into accepting ‘facts’ that are manifestly untrue. To documentarist Raoul Peck, that formula embodies a dangerous tendency of our time – as do so many of the other sinister mottos and euphemisms, from ‘newspeak’ to ‘doublethink’, that Orwell coined in his dystopian classic 1984. In Orwell: 2+2=5, Peck undertakes an account of the writer’s life, work and complex social roots, but also an urgent sense of just how much the nightmares Orwell imagined have become accepted as everyday givens in the age of Trump, Putin and social media. 

  The clarity and incisiveness of Orwell’s language and insights cut through 

Haitian director Peck has made some of the most trenchant and revealing documentaries of recent years, notably his James Baldwin study I Am Not Your Negro, last year’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found and the ambitious 2021 TV series Exterminate All the Brutes, a comprehensive study of colonialism and genocide. His Orwell film, which bows in Cannes Premieres, aspires to something of the same scope, cramming a huge amount of information and visual material into its two-hour span, and combining several different tonal registers.

Ultimately, however, it comes across as a confusing, breathless attempt to balance the varying demands of biography, exegesis and polemic, somewhat tripping itself up in the process. There’s no denying the film’s urgency, and audiences will certainly leave with plenty to chew over, but Peck doesn’t aid the thinking process by overloading us, where a more focused reading of Orwell’s key ideas could have yielded a much more cogent argument. 

The film is narratively structured around Orwell’s last years, beginning with his sojourn on the Scottish isle of Jura in 1946, where he began work on 1984, his final book, before being hospitalised with, and then dying from, tuberculosis. His letters and writings are read throughout by Damian Lewis, with passages including Orwell’s self-critical account of his own social background – notably his upbringing as a member of what he calls the British “lower upper middle-class”: education at Eton, followed by service as a policeman in Burma (now Myanmar). Later, he would embrace socialism and reject the values he was raised on, resulting in an acutely analytical approach to social and political issues as they emerged throughout his twentieth century.

Peck makes use of archive footage and clips from a wide range of films, including adaptations of Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, plus a number of Ken Loach works, notably Land And Freedom, to illustrate Orwell’s experience of the Spanish Civil War. He also densely collages illustrations of Orwell’s ideas about capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism and other forms of social control. He offers ample evidence of how relevant these ideas currently are, with economic disparity illustrated by images of Musk, Bezos and other plutocrats; information control by Rupert Murdoch and discussions around social media and the power of the algorithm; and so forth.

All roads lead inevitably to Trump, Putin and populist leaders such as Milei, Meloni and Modi. Archive comments from Milan Kundera, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Edward Snowden et al add grist to the mix. 

But what a dizzying mix it is, including statistics, graphs and other information flashed across the screen (notably translations of modern political euphemisms). In short, there are several documentaries in here, all struggling to make themselves heard – perhaps the least complete of which is a tantalising portrait of Orwell as a complex social critic. Damian Lewis’s readings are delivered in a breathy confidential tone that gives the film a rather more portentous edge than it needs. But the clarity and incisiveness of Orwell’s language and insights cut through what is otherwise a cluttered sketch towards a much more cohesive film.