02/09/2026 - VENICE 2026: Danny Boyle tells the salacious story of the UK’s notorious The Sun tabloid, with Jack O’Connell as the first editor under Rupert Murdoch’s leadership

Blood is thicker than water, it’s said, but ink is permanent. This is the power of publishing and the media well understood by Australian business tycoon Rupert Murdoch, whose purchase of the UK’s The Sun newspaper in 1969 led to his control of influential US right-wing news outlets such as Fox News and, at one point, the Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox. The received wisdom, on the centre and left, is that he pushed the whole media – and the ensuing public discourse – rightwards, forgoing its supposed key tenets of balance and plurality. Danny Boyle’s The Sun origin story Ink, opening this year’s Venice Film Festival competition, slightly tilts our sense of his responsibility, instead pitching his first editorial appointment, Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), as the devilish brains of the operation.

Ink was adapted by James Graham – a popular British playwright and screenwriter in the Jack Thorne mould – from his eponymous 2017 stage smash. Boyle had his roots in (and still returns to) theatre, but he successfully sends the text flying elbows-first into cinema; his stylistic arsenal of Dutch angles, warped frame rates and accelerating tracking shots still wonderfully splits the difference between kineticism and left-field eccentricity, 30 years after his Britpop breakthrough Trainspotting. Otherwise, Graham’s script is well observed, accurate (with it convincing on certain stranger-than-fiction details) and fairly objective in its point of view (unlike its subject), yet still blanches from richer, psychological insights into Lamb and Murdoch, and its vision of the early The Sun as prophetic to today’s desecrated media landscape is at once too generalised, and unsubtle, to obtain an op-ed page-like kick of insight.

It’s 1969, and to Boyle and production designers Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh’s credit, London still looks like the Blitz – the warm, golden lighting of the various plush interiors sometimes feels gaslit, rather than illuminated by the sheer white of paparazzi flashbulbs. This was indeed a more innocent, morally puritanical time on the British Isles; the future is never evenly distributed. Murdoch (a strong Guy Pearce, enjoying his photogenic character-actor phase) is an Aussie publishing upstart nursing an inferiority complex regarding his background as a “colonial” (to use the fusty English diction of the time), but holding a preternatural skill for making money, whatever his real background as a writer and journalist. He wants to displace the left-leaning Daily Mirror as the country’s most widely read paper, seeking to build the disreputable The Sun up from ground zero. Lamb, who had a past stint at The Mirror, begins as a more principled journalist, but with his insightful chasing, and exploitation, of public taste – especially its baser elements – he and the paper morally come undone.

If The Sun itself were eulogising Lamb, it would leap artlessly for his most dubious legacy: inaugurating “Page 3”, the topless-pic buyers’ incentive for its male readers. Boyle’s own British socialist credentials are again articulately stated: the free market itself chases the lowest common denominator, taking advantage of, rather than amplifying, our innocent drives for gossip and titillation. Still, Ink offers a calmly stated common-sense argument, rather than the scorched-earth response the issue probably needs. Perhaps a thread, somewhere on X or even TikTok, will have you covered.

Ink is a co-production by the UK, France and the USA, staged by House Productions and Media Res. StudioCanal also produces and handles its world sales.