BFI London Film Festival 2026 Preview: Ink

5 hours ago

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Danny Boyle has just delivered his finest film in years with Ink. Adapted from screenwriter James Graham’s play of the same name, Boyle’s fifteenth feature is a bruising chronicle of The Sun’s explosive rise to the nation’s most widely read and reviled newspaper. This sprawling biopic recasts the tabloid’s ascendant years through the tenure of its newly appointed editor Larry Lamb – the man who would forge the newspaper into the sensationalist juggernaut it's known as today. A timely reckoning with journalistic malpractice, Ink is an indictment of how we got here, a tilted portrait of what, if anything, remains of integrity in the press and readers birthed from the tabloid revolution.

Boasting a superb ensemble cast, Ink is anchored by Jack O’Connell as Lamb and Claire Foy as Jules Davies – a fictional amalgamation of several journalists – the leading pair turning in career highlights as the controversy-mongering minds behind The Sun's rebirth. The narrative framing of its transformation as their story, opposed to Guy Pearce's Rupert Murdoch, is a shrewd choice, their frontline perspective placing us in the thick of the paper’s volatile newsroom politics. The figures dramatised are not characterised as sympathetic in the slightest; Lamb's portrayal leaving very little in the name of ethical decency. O’Connell deftly captures a shameless opportunism in playing to the crowd, giving people what they want to read, as opposed to what they ought to hear, the film offering a wry, yet utterly repugnant, depiction of Murdoch’s first editor.

From the outset, Ink is elevated by the uncompromising grit of Boyle’s direction, resurrecting “the golden age” of Fleet Street as though its time never passed. While there is little doubt that fellow filmmakers were vying to adapt Graham’s play, it is almost inconceivable to imagine any other director at the helm. What Boyle does so well is capture the seedy underworld beneath the bluster of the tabloid’s bombastic headlines, its drinking, sex and rampant hedonism masking the cuthroat ambition at the heart of its operation. Not since Trainspotting (1996) has a Boyle film felt so disgustingly grounded in its own depravity, capturing Fleet Street’s heyday in all its debauched glory; the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake defining The Sun’s own editorial philosophy.

The creative gamble to partially shoot using a 360-degree camera unfortunately proves to be something of a mixed bag, the technology allowing the filmmakers to capture and reframe scenes from every angle simultaneously. As much as there is to admire in the film’s direction, a slightly jarring filmmaking choice that stems from this is the near-ceaseless use of Dutch angles. This choice is not without its merits in mirroring an off-kilter dynamism within the paper's growing instability, yet the stylistic justification behind its use feels less convincing with each passing appearance. Presentationally, it seems this intensely chaotic hyperstylisation is attempting to replicate similar biopics based upon controversial figures without any of the care or deliberation that went into their execution. While this might seem like a needless quibble, in an otherwise technically accomplished film, it becomes all the more frustrating given how stellar Ink's filmic prowess is elsewhere.

Even with these caveats, Ink has already cemented its place as one of the London Film Festival’s most memorable selections. Having already provoked a mixed response among festival audiences, the film is absolutely not without its flaws, yet nonetheless marks a compelling return to Boyle’s lurid, visceral and darkly comic brand of filmmaking. For all its stylistic misfires, Ink remains a damning reminder of the tabloid revolution’s enduring imprint on British culture, the moral compromises that continue to find an audience far beyond Fleet Street.