The Social Reckoning Review: A Documentary Disguised as a Feature Film

Rating: 1.5/5

Some films grab you by the collar. Others politely tap your shoulder and then forget why they did it. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is the second kind. It is a two-hour lecture dressed up as a feature film, and it never earns the trip to the cinema.

A story better told as a documentary

The material is important. Haugen leaked thousands of pages of internal Facebook records to the Journal, yielding a 2021 investigation known as the “Facebook Files,” which alleged the company was putting profits ahead of safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public. That is a story of real consequence. But a story’s importance does not make a film gripping. jammin983

Everything The Social Reckoning wants to say could have been said better, and more honestly, as a documentary. Archival footage, the actual congressional testimony, interviews with the people who lived it: that format would have carried the facts without the burden of trying to be cinema. Instead, Sorkin turns real events into a commercial drama and drains them of tension. We already know how this ends. The film offers no new angle, no twist of perspective, and no reason to stay in our seats beyond a sense of duty.

Nothing to hold on to

I searched for something to recommend and came up empty. Nothing here is interesting, gripping, thrilling, exciting or entertaining. The scenes move from conference room to café to newsroom and back, with characters reading out information the audience already has. The drama never rises above paperwork. Even Sorkin’s famously quick dialogue, usually his saving grace, feels like it is filling space rather than driving anything forward.

The comparison with its predecessor is unavoidable and unkind. The Social Network was driven by the restless energy of young disruptors, while this follow-up settles for a heavier, prestige-drama look. Fincher’s film had heat. This one has the temperature of a compliance report. Drab, dull and bland are the only words that fit. screendaily

Mikey Madison: one note, held for two hours

Oscar winner Mikey Madison plays Facebook engineer Frances Haugen. After her electric work in Anora, expectations were high. What she delivers here is below average. Madison wears a single expression from start to finish: a fixed, quietly worried look that never changes, whether Haugen is discovering damning evidence, risking her career or facing the most powerful company on earth. A whistleblower’s journey should hold fear, doubt, anger and resolve. Madison gives us none of that range. The character stays flat on the page and flatter on screen. westfield

Jeremy Allen White: ditto

The same is true of the male lead. Jeremy Allen White plays Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and he brings none of the nervy intensity that made him memorable in The Bear. He wears one expression too: furrowed, earnest and unchanging. A journalist chasing the story of his career should have some fire in him. White’s Horwitz never seems to feel the stakes, and so neither do we. Together, the two leads leave a hole at the centre of the film that no supporting player can fill. westfield

The verdict

The Social Reckoning treats an urgent subject with all the urgency of a slideshow. A documentary would have informed us. A great feature film would have shaken us. This film does neither. It is earnest, worthy and completely lifeless, a reminder that good intentions and a famous screenwriter do not make a movie.

Skip it in theatres. If the Facebook Files interest you, read the original reporting or wait for the documentary this film should have been.