‘Ink’ Review: Danny Boyle’s Rupert Murdoch Pressure Cooker Is a Journalism Thriller Tabloid-Ready for Our Political Apocalypse

That “Ink” begins as a story of Larry Lamb and Rupert Murdoch launching the tabloid newspaper The Sun in 1969 and ends with a montage including Trump and Elon Musk tells you all you need to know about Danny Boyle’s new film: This is a vividly directed if overcooked political parable about How We Got Here Now. If you’ve seen “Nightcrawler” or “Network,” there’s nothing new to take away about the if-it-bleeds-it-leads newsroom mentality, but Jack O’Connell (who also starred in Boyle’s “28 Years Later”) is terrific as an editor obsessively addicted to winning — and willing to mow down lives in the process.

Claire Foy is also striking as a feminist journalist whom Lamb (O’Connell) and Murdoch (Pearce) hire to bring a woman-centric edge to their daily print newspaper. The hair, the clothes, the makeup are to die for, as Boyle and his production team relish in period details and an ever-flowing, relentless pace. It’s directed with the energy of a thriller, with Boyle throwing everything at the screen as if he’s discovered filmmaking for the first time, with all the Dutch angles, crash zooms, and cranking, stuttering step-printing that necessitates. That’s all to say that the mind behind “Trainspotting” and “28 Days Later” delivers his signature, unfettered bravado — even if the social messaging of a movie about how Larry Lamb’s rag of a paper brought us to Donald Trump feels unsubtly overplayed by the end of its running time.

British actor O’Connell, who oozes a raffish street-wiseness and slight sociopathy onscreen, plays the 30-something outcast Lamb at a time when he entreated the Australian media baron Murdoch to change the face of news forever. It’s swinging London times, and the dexedrine and booze and sex are in no shortage. Screenwriter James Graham adapts his own lauded play, though Boyle’s energetic filmmaking never lets us see him trying to “open up” the play, which is no minor feat for any film based on a theater production. That’s even after his Steve Jobs biopic from 2015, scripted by Aaron Sorkin, felt expressly stage-bound and like the walls were closing in. An almost unrecognizable Pearce is weary of the lurid headlines Lamb produces — and all for the sake of The Sun becoming the world’s best-selling newspaper. To the point that Lamb is even willing to throw literal porn into its pages to drum up readership.

“Ink” is at its most electrifying in a late-breaking kidnapping plot involving the wife of Murdoch’s right-hand man, Sir Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde). Once Lamb starts publishing daily dispatches about her abduction at the hands of Indo‑Trinidadian radicals demanding a ransom, the writing is on the walls that this woman is going to die. (Muriel Freda McKay, played by Lucy Russell, was abducted when the ransomers mistook her for Murdoch’s wife.) The movie, though, offers scarce insight about the motivations behind the tragedy.

Boyle’s film is even macabrely funny as the newspaper staff thinks up headlines and story ideas that go way beyond the tawdry, from “Knickers Week” to publishing an excerpt, complete with graphics, of Terry Garrity’s sex-position manual “The Sensuous Woman.” That The Sun journalist Jules Davies (Foy) is having an affair with her married editor Lamb makes the editorial ethics even messier, even as this relationship goes mostly unplumbed by Graham and Boyle. Foy, though, is the best part of the movie, at first unflappable but eventually deeply disturbed about where the paper is heading.

O’Connell and Pearce are excellent as news hounds trying to outwit The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, and more at the risk of libel. The screenplay, though, leaves Lamb as something of a enigma (which he very well was to his colleagues, but to an audience, it’s less savory) despite a late-breaking blast to the past that implies how picked-on he was as a child. At one point, Boyle literally slathers him in spurts of newspaper ink to literalize how much blood is on his hands. Subtlety is not this director’s aim.

But nor was it Lamb’s, a megalomaniac for whom everything was copy and capable of being manipulated and exploited — and who makes Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) in “Network” looks sympathetic. (Though I do question “Ink” the movie’s suggestion that one woman’s murder is somehow the less morally offensive rock bottom than printing some nudie photos in the back pages of the paper.) The lessons that British director Boyle wants to tell us by the movie’s end are groan-inducingly predictable; if you did not see from outer space that these people burnished the platform for Donald Trump’s ascension, you’ve lost the plot. But “Ink” is bolstered by the strength of its actors, who realize characters who are never likable but are constantly fascinating.

Grade: B

“Ink” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Netflix opens the film in select theaters starting December 11 with streaming beginning January 8, 2027.