Danny Boyle’s ‘Ink’ Is a Time Capsule of Tabloid Chaos — And That’s Exactly Why It Works

Danny Boyle’s ‘Ink’ Is a Time Capsule of Tabloid Chaos — And That’s Exactly Why It Works

Danny Boyle has always had a nose for stories that smell like trouble. From the pill-popping squalor of Trainspotting to the operatic drowning survival of 127 Hours, he knows how to find the pulse in a chaotic room. With Ink, which opened the Venice Film Festival to a warm 4-minute ovation this week, Boyle has found his most volatile subject yet: the birth of the British tabloid The Sun, and the man who turned a struggling broadsheet into the most addictive — and destructive — news machine in modern history.

The film doesn’t pretend to be a neutral document. It is, by design, a riveting origin story told from the inside, with Jack O’Connell burning through the screen as Larry Lamb, the maverick editor who looked at a dying newspaper and asked a question that sounds almost innocent until you see what it becomes: what if we just gave people what they wanted?

The Accidental Revolutionary

Lamb is not a villain in the traditional sense, and Boyle is too smart to make him one. What makes Ink unsettling is that Lamb comes across as recognizably, almost touchingly human. He’s a union man who breaks with his own side. He’s a father whose family life fractures under the weight of his ambition. He believes, with a conviction that starts to feel like a fever, that he can build a newspaper the working classes actually want to read — as opposed to the broadsheet establishment’s idea of what they should read.

Guy Pearce, always excellent at playing men with a private architecture of ego, brings Rupert Murdoch an almost spectral menace. Pearce’s Murdoch is less a cartoon plutocrat than a man who has already won and is letting everyone else figure out the terms. The dynamic between Lamb and Murdoch — the palladium and the fire — is the film’s real engine. Lamb supplies the voice. Murdoch supplies the reach. Neither could have done it alone, and the film lets you feel that symbiosis like a live wire.

Claire Foy, returning to the period-piece terrain she navigated so well in The Crown, plays Jules Davies, the News International executive who serves as the film’s connective tissue between Lamb’s newsroom chaos and Murdoch’s boardroom calculus. Foy makes Davies more than a functionary — she is, in her own right, a navigator of this new landscape, and her scenes with both men carry a quiet current of complicity and resistance.

A Newsroom as a Pressure Cooker

The newsroom sequences are where Boyle’s direction becomes turbocharged. Ink understands that a newspaper is not just a product but an ecosystem — reporters, typesetters, printers, delivery drivers, advertisers, readers — all of them caught in the same gravitational pull. The film captures the sheer physicality of print journalism before the digital pivot: the clang of the composing room, the smell of ink, the sweat of a deadline met under duress. It feels like a time capsule, but it’s not nostalgia. It’s a record of an industry discovering, in real time, that speed would become its own kind of corruption.

The film’s most uncomfortable insight is that the tabloid revolution wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a series of small, reasonable decisions — a headline shortened here, a story sensationalized there, a boundary crossed because “everyone else is doing it” — that accumulated into something that would eventually eat the political and social fabric around it. Boyle lets you watch that accumulation happen, and the effect is cumulative in the viewer too. You don’t notice the slide until you’re already halfway down the slope.

Boyle’s Filmography Has Been Building Toward This

Seen alongside Boyle’s earlier work, Ink feels like a missing chapter in a director’s ongoing argument with systems of control. 28 Days Later was about what happens when the systems break down entirely. 127 Hours was about the individual against the landscape. Steve Jobs — a film he didn’t direct but shares a structural obsession with — dissected the man who built a different kind of empire out of control and design. Ink sits at the intersection of all three: a system being built in real time by a man who believes he’s serving the public, even as he’s serving himself.

It’s a Boyle film that trusts its audience to connect the dots without being told what to think. That confidence has always been his signature — the refusal to explain everything, the willingness to let a scene breathe until the audience catches up. It’s what makes the Venice ovation feel earned rather than ceremonial. The film is alive in a way that festival screenings sometimes aren’t.

The Venice Audience Knows Something We Don’t

The 4-minute standing ovation at the world premiere tells you something about how the film landed — but Venice audiences are notoriously generous to directorial ambition, and Boyle is one of the few filmmakers working today who can make a room stand up simply by refusing to be boring for 116 minutes. What the long run will tell us is whether Ink survives outside the festival glow, when viewed by audiences who bring more distance from the era it depicts and more skepticism about the industry it portrays.

Early critical reactions have been strong. The film’s writer, James Graham, brought his playwriting instincts to the material — he knows how to build scenes around conflict rather than exposition — and Boyle has matched that theatrical energy with a visual style that can shift from documentary grit to operatic sweep in a single cut. The result is a film that feels larger than its period setting, which is usually the mark of a project that has something urgent to say.

Why This Story Still Bites

It would be easy to watch Ink as a period piece and move on. That would be a mistake. The tabloid dynamics the film depicts — the race to the bottom in headlines, the blurring of news and entertainment, the way a media outlet can reshape political reality by choosing what to amplify — are not retired to the 1970s. They have, if anything, accelerated. The difference is that The Sun had to physically print and distribute its damage, while today’s equivalents push theirs across a screen in real time. The speed has changed. The appetite hasn’t.

That’s what makes Ink worth your time, and worth Boyle’s considerable talents. It is, on its surface, a film about a newspaper. But it’s really about what happens when someone figures out how to sell people the version of reality they already prefer — and how quickly that transaction becomes the ground everyone walks on.

Ink opened the Venice Film Festival and is expected to reach wider release later this year. The screenplay is by James Graham, based on his own stage play.