George Orwell titled his dystopian 1949 novel 1984, but it feels utterly current in 2025 when phrases like “Big Brother is watching you” might refer to Big Government, Big Business or Big Technology. Orwell is overdue for a fresh look and filmmaker Raoul Peck makes for an incisive and stirring guide. Peck has long put great writers at the center of his work, most notably in his Oscar-nominated documentary I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO about James Baldwin.
“I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts,” Orwell wrote. Those simple assets carried him far. While he’s best known as the author of Animal Farm and 1984, this film opens us to a wider range of his writing that drew from his personal experience of poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London, of colonialism in Burmese Days, and of revolutionary uprising in Homage to Catalonia.
Peck pulls lines and impressions from these works and others, enlisting British actor Damian Lewis to embody the voice of the author. Visually, Peck uses film footage from multiple adaptations of 1984 and Animal Farm. He layers in contemporary news and documentary footage to evoke the alarming rise of totalitarianism, surveillance and government violence in our present day.
It’s both conversely reassuring and frightening to see how much analysis Orwell brought to what we’re experiencing today. At age 46, nearing death from tuberculosis, the last sentence he wrote was: “All that matters has already been written.” (From the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival)
“A vital film….. Casting the author’s deathless words in a fresh light and gathering other dissident voices around him, Peck offers a sobering reminder of what’s at stake in this technology-defined age of doublethink and thoughtcrime, the world that Orwell foresaw and we occupy — and of how, for a long time now, we’ve been losing the plot.” —Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter “One of the most incisive and politically incendiary filmmakers working today, and ORWELL: 2+2=5 may be his widest-ranging and most ambitious work. (It’s also the first movie I’ve seen to make intelligent and purposeful use of generative A.I.) It’s dazzling and terrifying, a guide to a political movement that has been gathering steam for decades and shows no signs of letting up.” —Sam Adams, Slate “An artful balancing act, one that dips in and out of Orwell’s life and work, but also uses a broad array of reference points as it swings from history to art to the most current of events…. Less about Orwell than it is about us, and it’s less about 1984 than it is about 2025.” —Steve Pond, The Wrap
