Ink’s opening scene is slower than you might expect from a Danny Boyle opening. There’s no Trainspotting pavement pounding or 28 Years Later Teletubbies-interrupting bloody zombie apocalypse. Instead, two newspaper men talk about what makes a good news story over a lobster dinner. It’s slower because in this opening five minutes James Graham’s script (adapting his own West End play) slickly gets in all the important exposition, allowing Boyle to hit the gas once the lobster’s eaten for the remaining two hours.
The exposition: these two men are Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce), the Australian owner of the weekly News of the World, bearing a large chip on his shoulder, and Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), the overlooked northern editor of the Daily Mail, with a shoulder only slightly less chipped than his dining mate’s. Murdoch’s laying on the lobster to poach Lamb for the editor job of his newly acquired daily newspaper – a paper with 800,000 readers (‘and falling’), the laughing stock of Fleet Street, an obscure little broadsheet – The Sun.
Boyle’s style for the soaraway Sun
Lamb accepts, and we’re off – Lamb to assembly his team, Boyle to imprint the film with his usual punk rock style and kinetic energy. There’s the tilted framing, the spliced-in archive footage, and contemporary needle drops. Even the ‘poor man’s bullet time’ shots deployed in 28 Years Later’s kill scenes get a couple of less intense rollouts on pounded dinner tables and printing stones.
The style fits Murdoch and Lamb’s radical goal, which they pursue in differing ways and to different lengths throughout late 60s to late 70s timeline of the film. Their aim is to shake up the staid status quo of dry, moralising broadsheets by outselling them. How? By reporting on what people actually think and talk about. Sport. Women. The weather. Television. Smoking, drinking, gambling. Sex.
Ink explores what the news should and can be, at the time when The Sun changed what it was. Should it be a mirror, reflecting back to people who they are warts and all, or as Claire Foy’s Jules (a composite of several female reporters, and it shows) puts it, a window showing people the world? Inward and insular or outward and exploring? Ink shows how Lamb and Murdoch chose the former, offering an origin story of the politician’s defence, ‘I’m just saying what we’re all thinking’.
Media moguls as underdogs?
Boyle’s style matches his protagonists’ shared goal. But there’s an uneaseiness, an ickiness, when your punk rock underdogs are – checks notes – Rupert Murdoch and Sir Larry Lamb. Pearce’s Murdoch isn’t the aged amoral media mogul he becomes. O’Connell’s Lamb hasn’t yet received the ‘Sir’ bestowed by Margaret Thatcher. And while Graham’s script does show us Lamb descent into pure sensationalism and scandal, tossing out journalistic integrity as he goes, it also portrays Murdoch as a character who deserves the better part of our sympathy.
Murdoch is ruthless, but also conflicted. Conflicted about his paper’s trajectory and, moreover, condemnatory of Lamb’s exploitative editorial line. Perhaps the film’s most interesting moment is the display of Murdoch’s emotional compartmentalisation. During the kidnap of Muriel McKay, the wife of Murdoch’s right-hand man, Alick. Pearce is all shaking and spit as he rails at Lamb for running the story in (1960s) ‘real time’. Lamb hinders the police investigation, makes the intensely private public and exploits the vulnerability of worried Alick.
But in the same breath, with words of furious condemnation still echoing in the room, Murdoch commends his editor for doing what he is personally so angry about. Why? Simply because it has increased the paper’s readership. ‘Well done, Larry,’ he says. ‘Nearly there.’ He’s a Jekyll and Hyde with control over both aspects of his character, choosing when to be Rupert the man or Murdoch the mogul emerge. A man who will tell you when he doesn’t like what you’ve done, while telling you to carry on doing it so long as it brings him more money and power.
Empty ending
When you can ‘win’ by filling column inches with sensationalism, provocation and scandal, what’s the worst that can happen? It couldn’t lead anywhere bad, right? Over fifty years since The Sun became the most-read daily UK newspaper paper, we’re living the effects. So it’s shame that the film tacks this important slice of the story, the consequences of the events of the film, lazily onto the film’s closing minutes.
It takes the easy leaf out of BlacKkKlansman’s book: slapped-on stock footage to chart today’s consequences of the race towards extremism, fake news and political polarization that, it suggests, The Sun fired the starting gun for more than half a century ago. It feels like an afterthought, a slapdash link, which dulls the force of the point its trying to make: maybe the current media landscape, social media addiction and all, started in the late sixties between two men enjoying a lobster dinner.
Conclusion
Ink doesn’t threaten to take a place in Boyle’s best work, but his usual kinetic style is a good match for the story two of the most important figures in the story of the media industry – then and today. But the film’s portrayal of the these characters as simply flawed, rather than amoral (at best), leaves a sour taste.
Ink is released in select US cinemas on December 11 and across the UK on 8 January 2027.
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