‘Ink’ San Sebastian Review: Danny Boyle Turns Rupert Murdoch’s Tabloid Origin Story Into a Sensory Assault

More than half a century ago, back when traditional newspapers still controlled and dictated the daily news cycle, the journalistic habits were already forming that would eventually explode into tabloid sensationalism and, later, into the current power of social media, influencers, so-called «trash TV,» and news coverage that mines readers’ most basic instincts. That’s the theory — plausible, if not entirely complete — behind Ink, the new film from Danny Boyle, in which the British director deploys all his characteristic kinetic visual tricks to bring to the screen a stage play centered on the history of the British tabloid The Sun.

Regarded as the quintessential sensationalist outlet of its country — with its explosive headlines, its focus on everyday life, its crime coverage, its photos of topless women, its contests and giveaways, and other habits that were then considered innovative — The Sun is bought by the Australian Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) in 1969, and that’s where the film begins, with a meeting between the media mogul and Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), the journalist Murdoch would hire as editor-in-chief to relaunch the paper.

That meeting, the acquisition, and the difficult process of recruiting journalists willing to work there make up the first and best stretch of the film, one that lays out the traditional media landscape of England at the time, and shows Murdoch and the handful of journalists who dared take the leap — everyone on Fleet Street was convinced The Sun wouldn’t survive — fighting to impose editorial standards very different from the norm. In fact, that initial version of the paper comes across as populist in a (relatively) good sense: an attempt to pull newspapers out of their usual conservatism and closer to what readers actually cared about.

Across a plot that essentially covers the paper’s first decade of existence, Ink goes on to show how those early principles gradually erode, as Murdoch and an increasingly unrestrained, ethically murky Lamb — who makes the Australian mogul look downright timid and responsible by comparison, at least at this stage — chase subjects and stories that, in the name of sales, turn The Sun into a chaotic supermarket of news and product tie-ins. The film’s third act is built around a couple of episodes — one tied to a kidnapping the paper covered with considerable irresponsibility — that finally cut the paper loose from any remaining restraint, turning it into the anything-goes operation that foreshadowed today’s disinformation chaos.

Boyle tries to inject energy into the material with his usual bag of visual tricks, risky camera angles and excess — both in staging and in how his characters behave — and at times the chaos simply wears you down. For nearly half the film, it feels like you’re watching the trailer rather than the movie itself: fragments of scenes stitched together the way a montage sequence or a music video would be. But no — this is simply how Boyle tells a story: shards of scenes, flashes, sensations, assorted jolts. Only once the kidnapping plot kicks in do things settle down a bit.

It seems Boyle doesn’t quite register that, in the long run, his visual style closely mirrors what The Sun itself does journalistically: bombarding the reader/viewer with constant stimuli, never letting them think for themselves, building easily classifiable characters, and packaging everything as an attractive chaos that hooks audiences and convinces them they’re being told something of vital importance in the most condensed, simplistic way possible. From Trainspotting onward, Boyle has worked this way almost without exception. What happens here is that Ink is meant to function as a critique of the very sensory overload Boyle inflicts on his own audience.

The film will stir memories, at least for veterans, of old-school newsrooms with typewriters, cluttered workspaces, the tension of closing an edition, the nerves, arguments and fights that come with any editorial gauntlet. And The Sun kept raising the stakes constantly, so every day could bring either a triumph — Murdoch and Lamb were obsessed with overtaking the Daily Mirror in circulation, which initially outsold them three to one — or a disaster. Often it was both at once.

Much like The Social Network, what Ink does is capture the early stages of something that, over the years, would morph into something else entirely. Boyle even closes out this prehistory of tabloid sensationalism with a brief audiovisual recap that could be titled «Then and Now.» Through a long montage of headlines and events from recent decades, we arrive at a chaotic present in which Murdoch bears no small amount of responsibility, direct or indirect. It’s true that the evolution — or, more accurately, the devolution — from that brand of sensationalist journalism to today’s cocktail of streamers and influencers would likely have happened with or without The Sun. But that newspaper bears clear and forceful witness to that shift in eras, whatever the evident limitations of the portrait Boyle signs his name to.