Orwell : 2 + 2 = 5

With Orwell: 2+2=5, Raoul Peck delivers a dense, fiery, and unapologetically political essay film that finds as much urgency in George Orwell’s final years as it does in the fragile state of our contemporary world. This is not a biography in the traditional sense, nor is it a simple literary adaptation. Raoul Peck , the Haitian filmmaker best known for I Am Not Your Negro, approaches Orwell’s words as living instruments, applying them directly to the convulsions of our present moment. The result is a work that alternates between restraint and explosion, beginning in quiet meditation on a windswept Scottish island before plunging headlong into a barrage of images, slogans, and archival revelations that remind us how perilously close fiction and reality have drifted together.

The film’s opening passages are deceptively calm. Over aerial shots of Jura, where Orwell retreated in the late 1940s to complete 1984 while battling tuberculosis, we hear the actor Damian Lewis reading the author’s letters and essays. These words, at once intimate and prophetic, float across the screen with a meditative calm, almost lulling us into reflection. Yet Raoul Peck is never content with contemplation alone. As the narration continues, he begins to weave in film adaptations of 1984, newsreel footage, and images from uprisings and authoritarian crackdowns in places like Myanmar, Ukraine, Russia, and the Philippines. The effect is immediate: Orwell’s warnings about organized lying and the obliteration of objective truth do not belong to the past. They are today’s headlines, today’s nightmares.

Inevitably, Raoul Peck confronts American politics. He does so with a careful buildup, avoiding the temptation of easy polemic for nearly half an hour before unleashing images of January 6, 2021—the gallows for Mike Pence, the chaos inside the Capitol, and the chilling juxtaposition of Donald Trump describing the insurrection as “the love in the air.” It is one of Raoul Peck ’s boldest strokes, collapsing the space between Big Brother’s rhetoric and the language of populist strongmen. Yet what makes the moment resonate is not only the shock of recognition, but the sense that Orwell’s “Ignorance is Strength” has become more than a slogan—it has become a strategy. In placing Trump within Orwell’s matrix, Raoul Peck is not simply pointing to the obvious. He is underscoring the eerie efficiency with which lies have been weaponized as political tools.

Like all of Raoul Peck ’s films, this is a sprawling work. The director refuses to be contained by a single theme. He touches upon the hypocrisies of the Iraq War, the complicity of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, and Elon Musk, the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric across Europe, and even the looming threat of artificial intelligence as a new surveillance frontier. At times, the sheer abundance of material threatens to overwhelm the viewer. The pacing can feel relentless, almost like an information overload. But in that relentlessness lies a deliberate method. Raoul Peck is echoing Orwell’s own fear: that the constant barrage of distorted truths and euphemisms—“peacekeeping operations,” “collateral damage,” “illegals”—erodes our ability to distinguish between reality and fabrication. Watching the film feels less like absorbing a lecture and more like being swept into a current that refuses to let you stand still.

Yet Raoul Peck does not lose sight of Orwell the man. The documentary returns, with almost painful tenderness, to the author’s frail final years. We see the widowed Orwell raising his son on Jura, coughing blood into a handkerchief, yet still scribbling the novel that would outlive him. These passages, underscored by Lewis’s mournful yet resolute narration, remind us that Orwell was not merely a prophet but a human being shaped by contradictions. He was both a product of the colonial system and one of its most eloquent critics. He admitted, with searing honesty, that his time as a colonial officer in Burma had made him complicit in despotism. From that complicity grew his lifelong mistrust of power, his conviction that language itself could be corrupted into a weapon. Raoul Peck lingers on these moments not to canonize Orwell, but to underline the lived cost of bearing witness.

What makes Orwell: 2+2=5 especially unsettling is its insistence that we are no longer looking at a distant warning but at a mirror. When Orwell wrote 1984, he feared a world in which history could be rewritten, where “2+2=5” could be believed if enough force was applied. Raoul Peck demonstrates, sometimes with terrifying bluntness, that this world has already arrived. The parallels to AI deepfakes, to media conglomerates filtering our discourse, to leaders exploiting fear of outsiders, are so precise that the documentary begins to feel less like analysis than diagnosis. One is reminded of Milan Kundera’s confession, included in the film, that he once dismissed Orwell for being too pedagogical—until time proved just how accurate Orwell’s vision was.

There are flaws, to be sure. Some viewers will find Raoul Peck ’s reach too wide, his tone too insistent. At moments, subtlety gives way to provocation, such as in the segment where contemporary antisemitism is reduced to a blunt slogan on screen. These are instances where the film risks becoming guilty of the very simplification Orwell himself warned against. And yet, even in its missteps, Orwell: 2+2=5 pulses with urgency. Raoul Peck is less concerned with scholarly precision than with shaking his audience awake, forcing us to grapple with what it means to live in an age where truth itself is under siege.

In the end, the film is less about Orwell than about us. It asks how we respond to authoritarianism when it no longer comes in jackboots but in algorithms and soundbites. It asks whether, in a time when facts can be erased with a keystroke, ordinary citizens can still resist. Orwell once wrote that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” Raoul Peck takes that dictum to heart, crafting a work that is overtly political yet never forgets the moral stakes. When Lewis’s narration closes with Orwell’s faith that “the common people have never parted company with their moral code,” the line feels less like consolation and more like a challenge.

Orwell: 2+2=5 may not achieve the crystalline brilliance of I Am Not Your Negro, but it stands as a vital, galvanizing work of political cinema. It is both a reminder and a provocation, insisting that Orwell’s warnings were never meant to sit quietly on a classroom shelf. They were meant to be heard, debated, and, above all, acted upon. In today’s climate, Raoul Peck ’s film does not just feel relevant—it feels necessary.

Orwell: 2+2=5
Directed by Raoul Raoul Peck 
Produced by Alex Gibney, Blair Foster, Tamara Rosenberg, Nick Shumaker
Music by Alexeï Aïgui
Cinematography: Benjamin Bloodwell, Stuart Luck, Julian Schwanitz
Edited by Alexandra Strauss
Production companies : Closer Media, Anonymous Content, Jigsaw Productions
Distributed by NEON (United States)
Release date: October 3, 2025 (United States)
Running time: 119 minutes

Seen on September 11 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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