There is an obvious temptation in making a movie about The Sun: make the movie behave like The Sun. Danny Boyle does not resist it. Ink is fast, loud, lurid, funny, shamelessly manipulative and almost pathologically afraid of letting an image sit still. Headlines slam into the frame, presses thunder, bodies crowd the newsroom and the soundtrack pushes everything forward. For long stretches, the method is exhilarating. Eventually, it becomes part of the problem.
Adapted by James Graham from his own stage play, the film begins with Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the struggling British newspaper in 1969 and his recruitment of editor Larry Lamb to transform it. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch as a man whose quietness is more unnerving than a larger impersonation would have been. Jack O'Connell's Lamb is the more immediately magnetic figure: ambitious, resentful of the establishment, alert to what ordinary readers might actually want and increasingly willing to destroy the distinction between giving people a voice and giving them whatever will keep them buying tomorrow's paper.
Boyle is an almost too-perfect director for the material. Few filmmakers are better at creating forward motion from institutions, rooms and procedures. He can make a newspaper office feel like a nightclub, a factory and a battlefield in the same sequence. Editors bark across desks, layouts change under pressure, circulation figures become sporting results, and the physical act of printing carries a charge that makes the decline of print journalism feel briefly impossible to imagine. Ink loves the tactile machinery of newspapers even while documenting how one paper helped poison the culture around them.
That contradiction is the movie at its strongest. Lamb and Murdoch do not begin as cartoon villains plotting the destruction of public life. Their revolution has a genuinely populist appeal. The old press establishment is class-bound, smug and disconnected. Lamb's instinct that newspapers should be more immediate, more emotional and less reverential does not sound inherently sinister. The trap closes gradually: every successful breach of taste becomes permission for the next one, and every circulation victory makes restraint look like weakness.
O'Connell is excellent at making that progression feel like ambition rather than a prewritten moral lesson. His Lamb is rougher and more charming than the people who dismiss him, which allows the audience to understand the seduction before the consequences arrive. O'Connell has always been particularly good at characters who seem to be fighting the room before anyone has challenged them, and Boyle uses that defensiveness as fuel. Lamb's anger at the establishment is real; the film's tragedy is how easily real grievance can become a business model.
Pearce makes a different choice with Murdoch. Rather than leaning heavily on accent, prosthetics or obvious villainy, he plays him as watchful and almost withholding, a man who prefers to discover what someone will do before telling them what he wants. The restraint is effective because Ink is largely Lamb's story. Murdoch does not need to dominate every scene when the system he establishes is already shaping everyone else's behavior. Pearce's stillness also gives him a useful contrast with Boyle's hyperactive camera.
Claire Foy, as Jules, provides another point of resistance inside the newsroom, but the film's relationship to its women is complicated by the history it is dramatizing. The rise of Page 3 and the increasing sexualization of the paper are not side notes to this story; they are central evidence in the movie's case about attention becoming a commodity. Boyle stages the escalation with enough energy that the audience can feel why it worked commercially, though the film sometimes risks finding the very spectacle it criticizes too entertaining.
That problem becomes sharper in the treatment of the Muriel McKay kidnapping, the real 1969 crime in which McKay was abducted after being mistaken for Murdoch's wife. The episode gives Ink a much darker register and an opportunity to connect the paper's culture of appetite to actual human cost. Yet it does not sit comfortably beside the movie's swaggering newsroom comedy. Boyle wants the tonal collision to sting, but the film has spent so much time teaching us to enjoy its speed that the sudden demand for sobriety can feel imposed rather than earned.
This is where Ink's larger argument becomes frustratingly slippery. Boyle and Graham clearly understand that the story is not merely about one vulgar newspaper. The habits being formed — outrage as product, intimacy as content, attention as the ultimate metric — stretch directly into cable news, social media and the algorithmic economy. The movie can see the line. It is less certain about what to do with it beyond pointing.
There is also something slightly evasive about making a moral history of sensationalism that is itself so committed to sensational form. That could have been the point: a film implicating the viewer by making the race to the bottom irresistible. At times, it is. But Ink rarely turns that implication back on us with enough force. Boyle's style is so muscular and entertaining that the movie can leave you impressed by the mechanism at the same time it is asking you to mourn what the mechanism produced.
Still, this is not a dull failure of argument. It is a lively, frequently gripping movie whose shortcomings are bound up with its pleasures. Boyle remains one of the few directors who can make mainstream historical drama feel physically alive, and O'Connell gives him an ideal engine. The film's best sequences have the reckless confidence of people inventing the rules while they are already breaking them.
Ink ends up somewhere between warning and reenactment. It knows that modern media did not become degraded in a single moment and that the people who accelerated the process often believed they were democratizing it. That ambiguity is more interesting than a simple Murdoch villain story, even if the film occasionally uses ambiguity as a substitute for judgment.
