Orwell: 2+2=5: Raoul Peck’s portrait of George Orwell dives deep into Nineteen Eighty-Four but finds few new answers

In the back seat of a car, a man repeatedly quizzes a child on the equation 2+2. Satisfied the correct answer has been committed to memory, he warns him: “A lot of people will tell you the answer’s five. Usually, they’re called governments.” The line is inspired by George Orwell’s fable Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which the authoritarian government of the superpower Oceania works to construct a cowed, self-policing population, entirely hollowed of any faith in dissent or self-determination. Director Raoul Peck’s choice to put the novel at the centre is not merely to honour a work of fiction, but to confront the audience with the urgent and increasingly prophetic nature of Orwell’s body of work.

The Haiti-born, Congo-raised, Berlin-educated Peck is best known for films chronicling the politics and betrayals of Black leftist agitators in Africa and the Americas: Haitian Corner (1987), Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1990) and his award-winning polemical portrait of James Baldwin I Am Not Your Negro (2016). Opening with scenes from Ukraine and Myanmar, Orwell: 2+2=5 seizes the internationalist thread in his past work to create a roving, interconnected survey of the ways in which governments fail, con and torture their citizens.

Orwell (voiced by Damian Lewis) provides narration in the form of excerpts from his writings, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and, more frequently, the essay ‘Why I Write’ (1946). The first image of him that we see is jarring and unexpected, but provides vital context for the subsequent theses and, perhaps, Peck’s own identification with the protagonist – like Peck, Orwell’s childhood was marked by empire, though an empire with entirely different power dynamics. A black-and-white portrait from 1903 captures a veiled South Asian woman staring directly into the camera. We pan out, to reveal a white baby swaddled in her arms: the young Orwell being cradled by his nanny. Born Eric Arthur Blair in Bihar in British India, to a father employed by the government to regulate local opium trade, Orwell was descended, by way of Dorset, from owners of plantations in Jamaica. Though mostly raised in England, at the age of 19 he returned east to serve in the British police force in Burma. Peck’s intercontinental enquiry is punctuated by Orwell’s reflections, derived from that time, on hierarchy, alterity and divide-and-rule.

Orwell’s self-portrait is not always flattering, and in particular is frank about the mechanics of oppression from the point of view of someone who has both benefited from and experienced the brunt of its whims. At one point, the film quotes the writer’s reflections, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), on his life as a policeman in Burma, in which he says that “every ‘native’ face [the coloniser] sees on the street brings home to him his monstrous intrusion”, and recalls how “servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage… haunted me intolerably.” Peck, through a fast-paced collage of itinerant footage, demonstrates how such cruel interpersonal exchanges prop up global, systemic injustices in places and at times far beyond those that Orwell himself inhabited.

Peck splices film adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four – made in 1956 and 1984 by Michael Anderson and Michael Radford respectively – with allied modern political critiques, such as Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016). But he also draws from current sites of devastation, using drone shots of an eviscerated Gaza and headline imagery of Mediterranean drownings. This distant, journalistic camerawork is supplemented by Big Brother-esque technologies that often tempt their users into self-incrimination: screenshots from social media, videos filmed on iPhones or generated by AI. For such a simple and self-evident thesis – that much of what is described in Nineteen Eighty-Four functions as lucidly accurate commentary on present-day geopolitics and state-citizen relations – the montages feel at times bloated and truistic. Proving and even escalating Orwell’s observations in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the contemporary manifestations chosen by Peck, such as Donald Trump recalling the 6 January 2021 siege of the Capitol as “a day of love”, are proof that truth is often very much stranger than fiction.

“At the moment of death, you must still insist that the answer is four,” says the anonymous ‘prole’ who addresses the child early on in the film. This commitment to bearing witness to and articulating truth in the face of perversion courses through Orwell: 2+2=5, which exposes the double-edged nature of film and recording technology as a medium of both surveillance and, when in Peck’s capable hands, of cautionary subversion.

► Orwell: 2+2=5 is in UK cinemas 27 March.