Ink Review: Danny Boyle Prints the Legend, Then Struggles to Read the Fine Print

Ink (Netflix) | Directed by Danny Boyle | Written by James Graham | Starring Jack O'Connell, Guy Pearce, Claire Foy | In theaters December 11; streaming on Netflix January 8, 2027

There is a line that runs through every frame of Danny Boyle's Ink: give the people what they want. It is the founding creed of The Sun, the British tabloid Rupert Murdoch bought for pocket change in 1969 and turned into the most read, most reviled newspaper in the English-speaking world. It is also, not coincidentally, the creed of the streaming platform releasing this film. That tension, between a movie that wants to indict a media culture and a movie that wants very badly to be liked, is the most interesting thing about Ink, and the thing it never fully resolves.

Adapted by James Graham from his own 2017 play, Ink opens with a young Murdoch (Guy Pearce), an Australian outsider with money and a chip on his shoulder, purchasing a dying broadsheet from the establishment owners of the Daily Mirror. He hires Larry Lamb (Jack O'Connell), a working-class Yorkshireman who has spent his career being passed over on Fleet Street, and gives him a mandate that is equal parts dare and death wish: beat the Mirror in a year.

Lamb's answer is to build a paper out of everything the respectable press considers beneath it. Sex, television, horoscopes, gossip, giveaways, and eventually the topless Page 3 girl that would define the paper's brand for half a century. Graham's structural insight, carried over intact from the stage, is that this is fundamentally a heist story. Lamb assembles a crew of misfits, sets a target, and the first half of the film has the rhythm of a caper: the plan, the recruits, the impossible deadline, the score.

Boyle has always been a director of velocity, and Ink is his most kinetic film in years. He shoots the newsroom and the printing halls as a single organism, all whip-pans, Dutch angles, jump cuts, and needle drops that reach forward into the 1970s and punk rather than sitting politely in 1969. The presses themselves get the treatment he once gave the Edinburgh streets in Trainspotting: cavernous, oily, roaring, an industrial underworld that turns words into money overnight.

The approach is the right one for the material. A film about sensationalism that plays it straight would be lying about its subject. But Boyle's style carries a risk that he does not always manage. Speed is seductive. When every montage of a circulation jump is scored like a victory lap, the film keeps inviting us to cheer for the very thing it is supposed to be warning us about. A recurring dream image of Lamb and Murdoch on a runaway train tells us Boyle knows this. The question is whether the film's own momentum ever slows enough for the audience to feel the danger rather than just be told about it.

Jack O'Connell is the engine. His Lamb is a man who has been condescended to his entire life and finally has a lever to pull, and O'Connell plays the pull as something close to addiction. Each scandal, each circulation record, lands on his face as a hit he needs to repeat. It is a magnetic performance precisely because it refuses to ask for our sympathy, and it confirms O'Connell, after Sinners and 28 Years Later, as one of the most watchable actors working.

Guy Pearce's Murdoch is a more surprising choice. Pearce plays him not as the bogeyman of later decades but as a nervy, ambitious money man who periodically flinches at his own editor's excesses. This is historically defensible; Murdoch was the capital, Lamb was the id. But it also has the effect of distributing blame in a way that makes Murdoch the more reasonable figure in the room. Given who Murdoch became, that is a choice a viewer can reasonably find generous to the point of evasion.

Claire Foy plays Jules Davies, a composite of several real women who worked at the paper. She functions as the film's conscience, the person who helps build the machine and then recoils from it, and Foy's late speech to the staff is the moment where Ink finally stops moving and looks at itself. It is the best scene in the film. It is also a scene the film needed twenty minutes earlier.

Graham's play was praised in London for its even-handedness: it took seriously the idea that the establishment press was snobbish, that working-class readers were ignored, and that Lamb's populism began as a genuine democratic impulse before it curdled. The film keeps that framing, and it is the source of both its intelligence and its weakness.

The intelligence: Ink understands that "the people" is a category that can be flattered and exploited in the same breath. Lamb's genius was to speak to readers the Mirror talked down to; his crime was to decide that speaking to them meant feeding them whatever kept them buying. Anyone who has watched the same pattern play out on a cable news chyron or an algorithmic feed will recognize the mechanism.

The weakness: the film's even-handedness starts to look like reluctance. For most of its running time, Ink is content to show consequences without assigning them. The final third darkens, and Boyle closes with a montage that draws a line from Lamb's newsroom to our current information chaos. But the montage is doing the work the drama should have done. It is an argument stapled to the end of a film that spent two hours being a good time.

There is also the matter of who is missing. The Sun under Lamb and Murdoch did not just sell sex and horoscopes; its populism had targets, and immigrants and Black Britons were among them from the start. A film about the birth of a "new kind of news" that treats the paper's audience as a single undifferentiated working class is telling only part of the story about who "the people" were and who they were being taught to resent. Ink gestures at this. It does not sit with it.

Boyle has acknowledged that roughly thirty seconds of the film use AI to animate archival photographs. It is a small thing and an ethically defensible one. It is also a quietly ironic choice in a film about a newsroom that decided the truth of an image mattered less than its effect.

Ink is a thrilling, superbly acted, visually relentless film about the moment modern media learned that outrage and titillation scale better than information. It is the rare awards-season drama that is never boring. But its refusal to fully commit to an argument, and its instinct to make the ride enjoyable, leave it feeling like a film that admires the monster more than it fears it. Graham and Boyle know exactly what Lamb built. They just never quite decide how angry to be about it.

Watch it for O'Connell, stay for Foy, and then ask yourself why you had so much fun.

Ink is realeased in select theates on December the 11th and on Netflix on January 8th