On January 8, 2021, Donald Trump Jr. took to X (then Twitter) to declare that his father’s suspension from the platform was a sign that “We are living in Orwell’s ‘1984.’ Free speech no longer exists in America.” The irony that the elder Trump’s actions leading to the ban — spreading false information that the 2020 election was rigged on the platform and directly causing an attempted insurrection of the U.S. Capitol building — fit far more into George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel and its vision of a future ruled by misinformation and propaganda is one that Jr. was seemingly entirely unaware of.
It was a sign of how, in spite of the cultural ubiquity the short, pioneering 1949 science fiction novel has obtained — introducing terms like “Big Brother,” “doublethink,” and “thoughtcrime” into the cultural lexicon and remaining a staple of high school curriculums in its native Britain and across the pond in the United States — a frighteningly large amount of people seem incapable of processing what Orwell’s vision of a future ruled by fear, surveillance, and a controlling superstate actually means, and how close to home it hits in our current political landscape.
So if Raoul Peck‘s new documentary “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5” might sometimes feel like it’s preaching to the choir, drawing comparisons between modern politics and the terrors of Oceania that plenty of academics have already made, perhaps it’s best to keep in mind that for many viewers, its conclusions will be far less obvious.
Peck, a Haitian filmmaker whose work has always had a strong political bent, is best known for his 2016 essay film “I Am Not Your Negro,” which uses the unfinished James Baldwin manuscript “Remember This House” as the skeleton for an examination of the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Orwell” plays like a spiritual successor to his Oscar-nominated breakthrough, mixing Orwell’s writings and letters — narrated by “Homeland” star Damian Lewis — with archival photographs, footage from various adaptations of “1984” (including the 1956 version starring Edmund O’Brien as bureaucrat Winston and the version starring John Hurt released on the actual year), footage from other movies ranging from “Oliver Twist” to “Notting Hill,” and modern day news reports to argue how Orwell’s fears of a totalitarian state have already come true.
The result isn’t as riveting as “I Am Not Your Negro” — it feels less personal and more generic, like a term paper someone could have written in undergrad. Still, Peck makes his points well, and accomplishes what he sets out to do by getting your blood pressure rising.
The film starts with text explaining how, in 1946, Orwell decamped to Jura, an island off the coast of Scotland, where he would spend the remaining four years of his life working on a manuscript that would become “1984.” Rather than taking the traditional path of focusing on Orwell’s life during this time, however, Peck is more interested in how the ideas the author developed in Jura still feel so relevant today. Loosely, the film structures itself around the famous doublethink party motto of Oceania: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,” using each component as another avenue into exploring modern fascism.
Peck casts a wide net in who he applies to his gaze to, looking broadly at the rise of alt-right movements across the globe, from the USA to Europe to Asia. “War is Peace” incorporates footage of George Bush declaring war on Iraq, as well as disturbing footage of both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide of Palestine. Via “Freedom is Slavery,” Peck takes a look at how modern fascist and right-wing movements build complicity within their bases, as well as the growing income inequality crisis occurring globally. With “Ignorance is Strength,” the film peers into the rampant misinformation caused by conservative news outlets and growing anti-intellectualism and book banning.
Unsurprisingly though, a very large portion of the film centers around Donald Trump, and how his cult of personality, his disregard for the truth and obvious lies, and his willingness to subvert democracy all prove eerily similar to the omnipresent, unseen Big Brother of “1984.” In many respects, the film already feels out of date, mostly covering Trump’s crimes during his first term as well as the January 6 Capitol insurrection rather than dipping into the more flagrant fascism of his past few months back in office. And, in relitigating controversies that have been been pecked and prodded at for years at this point, “Orwell” sometimes winds up making points you’ve probably read in a hundred online essays already.
Still, as pat as a point of reference as “1984” and the phrase “Orwellian” has become on the internet, that doesn’t mean Peck doesn’t make the comparisons well. His research is thorough and persuasive, and occasionally finds a new, refreshing angle to apply the analysis, such as one segment that explores how AI-generated “art” ties back to the themes of the novel. On a technical level, “Orwell” is sharply made, cross-cutting between “1984” footage and modern day interviews to allow the audience to bridge the gap on their own terms, with only occasional graphics used to illustrate particularly disturbing or stark statistics when needed. It helps that Lewis is an excellent narrator, giving his version of Orwell a perfect touch of wry humor in his voice that makes some of the more upsetting moments easier to stomach.
With the film’s sociological critiques so pointed, “2 + 2 = 5” loses its edge whenever it sporadically attempts to include material fleshing out Orwell’s life outside of his most famous creation. His other well-known allegory for Stalinist Russia, “Animal Farm,” gets a brief acknowledgement, but the other work goes largely ignored. Sparse content about his personal life — including the death of his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy and how his second Sonia Brownell inspired the character of Julia in “1984” — feels vestigial rather than illuminating.
Most frustrating, Orwell’s limitations both politically and personally — especially the sexism, homophobia, and classism that occasionally seeped into his novels and essays — don’t receive much implicit or explicit acknowledgement within the film. A revealing bit of narration from Orwell notes how, as a young man, “he was both a snob and a revolutionary,” an Eton-educated member of the middle class whose socialism was based more on theory than struggle. But Peck doesn’t take the time to look into how that background affected his portrayal of the proles in “1984” as unwashed, undignified masses. You could read something radical into Peck’s choice to take the words of a white British man who never had much, if anything, to say about race in his writings and apply his concepts to modern-day systemic racism: one segment compiles several quotes from Trump about the Black community juxtaposed with fake AI images he used for his campaign in 2024, while footage from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests is prominently featured.
“1984” famously ends on a pitch black note of despair: Winston has been broken by the Party’s torture and released back into the world as a complacent puppet, one who passively writes 2 + 2 = 5 on a coffee table while declaring his love for Big Brother. Peck’s film climaxes with a montage of this sequence as depicted in the novel’s various film adaptations, but it ends by looping around to an earlier section of the book, where Winston muses to himself that “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”
In some respects, this appeal to the common man conclusion feels a bit false, given how uncompromising Orwell was at denying his audience catharsis. Still, one has to take account of the different functions Orwell and Peck’s works serve: while Orwell wrote “1984” as a warning of where the world could be headed, Peck made a film about the world we already live in. How do you find the strength needed, living in totalitarianism, to believe that things can change for the better?
“My chief hope for the future,” Lewis narrates as Orwell as the film draws to its close, “is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code.”
Grade: B-
“Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5” had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Neon will distribute the film in the United States.
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