Rating: R | Runtime: 119 minutes
Release Date: October 3rd, 2025 (USA) / February 25th, 2026 (France)
Studio: Le Pacte / Neon
Director(s): Raoul Peck
Writer(s): Raoul Peck

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

Who besides George Orwell is better to use as your window onto what our world has become? Everything he wrote about was a metaphor for what he had seen throughout history, but also a premonition of how those atrocities were paving the way for worse. And, as evidenced by the letters and diaries Raoul Peck uses as narration for his cinematic collage, few were positioned better than Orwell’s radicalized critic of political power to fully understand those ramifications.

Less a biography of the writer than a dismantling of the strongman rhetoric and ignorant masses willing to lap it up behind our current global technocracy-mediacracy-oligarchy hybridized police state, Orwell: 2+2=5 plays like an apology for not heeding the author’s warnings. Peck has Damian Lewis say the words, plays the visualization of them via an adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm, and then juxtaposes both with a horrific example from reality.

It was a great choice to use Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for a majority of the Animal Farm visualizations and I loved the moments where Peck compiles a long collection of news hosts and pundits regurgitating the same talking point that was obviously fed to them from on high. There’s no surprise that he also found Ken Loach’s works perfectly epitomized the economic and class disparities driving today’s partisanship and tribalistic hate.

While not as strong as I Am Not Your Negro (few are), I do think Orwell: 2+2=5 excels as a well-researched and executed essay that drives Peck’s themes and point home. Will it change minds? Probably not. I’m too cynical to believe those who need it will watch, let alone have the humility to absorb it and recognize their place within. But it does reinforce what the rest of us know by confirming that our refusal to ignore the truth is the best weapon we have.

---

A scene from ORWELL: 2+2=5; courtesy of Neon.