Rupert Murdoch enters Ink as a young man with a bad newspaper and a very good instinct. It is 1969. He gives editor Larry Lamb one impossible instruction: beat the Daily Mirror. Everything that follows—sex, celebrity, crime, populist swagger and the transformation of news into a daily nervous system—begins as an underdog story.

Danny Boyle understands the seduction. His film, which opened the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 2, moves with the speed of the product it depicts. Pages spin. Headlines land. A scrappy team discovers that attention can be manufactured, measured and sold. Guy Pearce’s Murdoch and Jack O’Connell’s Lamb do not initially look like the establishment. They look like men having the idea before everyone else.

That is where the film becomes more interesting than a simple villain biography—and more dangerous. Cinema can condemn a powerful man in dialogue while making him irresistible through rhythm, casting and scale. The audience knows what Murdoch’s empire will become. The camera still wants to know what it felt like to win.

The villain arrives with movie-star lighting

Boyle has said that he did not want to turn Murdoch into a monster. His reasoning is serious: if evil arrives fully formed and visibly inhuman, everybody else leaves the cinema innocent. Ink instead introduces Murdoch as an Australian outsider dismissed by Fleet Street’s old guard. Pearce gives him control without stiffness, ambition without pantomime. The mogul becomes legible as a person before he becomes legible as a system.

This is good drama. It is also a luxury powerful subjects receive more often than their consequences do. A billionaire can become complicated for two hours; the people whose lives are shaped by his institutions appear as crowds, readers, victims or data. The closer the camera gets to power, the more easily intimacy starts to look like insight.

The irony sharpened in Venice when Pearce revealed that Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth had told him her father was pleased by the casting. Murdoch had not yet seen the film, but he already understood one of cinema’s oldest transactions: to be played by a compelling actor is to be granted an afterlife with flattering bone structure.

Sensationalism already knows how to entertain

Ink has an aesthetic problem because its subject invented an aesthetic solution. The tabloid compresses complexity into appetite: a face, a pun, a scandal, a fear. Boyle’s cinema also runs on compression. Quick cuts, tilted angles and rock music turn a production process into momentum. A newspaper office becomes a heist crew with a deadline.

The pleasure is intentional. Boyle wants viewers to understand why Murdoch and Lamb’s version of The Sun felt insurgent in a rigid class system. The paper addressed readers ignored or patronised by the respectable press. It treated sport, television, gossip and sex as the substance of everyday life, not material too vulgar to print. Popularity was not simply imposed from above; it answered a real hunger from below.

But style can outrun judgment. Several early Venice reviews admired the film’s speed while questioning its bite, particularly when Lamb’s moral descent becomes darker than Murdoch’s. The movie shows a race to the bottom with the exhilarating form of a race to the top. When the critique feels this good, the audience may leave remembering the acceleration more clearly than the damage.

A system is harder to cast

Film prefers a face. A close-up can hold ambition, fear and contradiction; a corporate structure cannot look back. This is why stories about media power repeatedly become stories about media men, from Charles Foster Kane to Logan Roy. Ownership is translated into temperament. Political influence becomes a family drama. Industrial strategy becomes the twitch of a jaw.

Real media power is less photogenic. It lives across ownership, distribution, advertising, labour, regulation and the daily repetition that turns one editorial instinct into an atmosphere. It also depends on an audience. Boyle’s refusal to isolate Murdoch as a monster points towards that larger network: the paper succeeded because millions of people bought it, repeated it and learned to see themselves through it.

Yet shared responsibility can become another kind of escape. Readers choose from environments that owners help construct. Editors decide which appetites to cultivate, which prejudices to legitimise and which stories to repeat until they feel like common sense. The audience is part of the machine. It does not follow that every part owns the same amount of power.

Empathy has a price

Humanising a subject is not the same as forgiving him. The problem is not that Ink finds Murdoch interesting. The problem is how quickly interest can be mistaken for proportion. A film may spend two hours excavating the psychology of the owner and only minutes with the lives reduced to material by his paper.

Claire Foy’s Jules, a fictional composite of women who worked on Fleet Street, makes that imbalance visible. She occupies a newsroom where women can be journalists, colleagues and images to be sold at once. The introduction of topless photographs is not merely a colourful milestone in the paper’s rise. It is a business decision that reorganises who gets to look, who must be looked at and which body carries the price of circulation.

A sharper political film does not need to delete Murdoch’s charisma. It needs to show where charisma travels. Who receives permission because he is charming? Who absorbs risk because he is ambitious? Whose private life becomes public inventory? Empathy becomes useful when it moves through the institution instead of stopping at the most powerful person in the room.

Cinema can still make power visible

The value of a film such as Ink is not that it can defeat a media empire by representing its origin. No feature can carry that fantasy honestly. Cinema’s political strength is smaller and more specific: it can give abstract systems space, rhythm and consequence. It can show that a headline begins as a choice made by somebody in a room.

Venice has placed that question inside a wider programme concerned with who controls reality. This year’s festival includes Alex Gibney’s documentary about Elon Musk, films about independent Russian journalists, Gaza and other conflicts in which images are part of the struggle itself. Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal described films as unavoidably political. The interesting question is not whether they take a position, but what their form teaches viewers to desire.

Boyle carried the argument into the present when he asked whether an AI journalist could ever speak truth to the technology company that created it. The question updates Ink without making 1969 feel safely historical. A printing press, a platform and a language model are different machines. Each can still hide ownership behind the apparent neutrality of distribution.

The audience is not outside the machine

The cleanest version of this story would leave Murdoch guilty, journalists corrupted and viewers absolved. Ink is more uncomfortable when it refuses that arrangement. The tabloid did not only tell readers what to think. It learned what made them look, then built a business around returning the sensation more efficiently.

Contemporary platforms have automated that feedback loop, but they did not invent it. Engagement is circulation with a faster dashboard. Outrage is a headline that refreshes itself. Personalisation gives every reader a private front page while ownership and infrastructure become harder to see. The modern media mogul does not always need to choose the story; he can own the system that rewards the choice.

This is also why cinema still matters. A film creates a temporary public rather than an individual feed. It holds different viewers inside the same sequence and asks them to stay with consequences after the thrill has moved on. That is not revolution. It is a form of attention that the tabloid—and the algorithm after it—would rather interrupt.

The better ending is discomfort

A movie challenges power when it makes power readable without making the reading easy. It can allow a mogul charm without confusing charm with innocence. It can acknowledge popular desire without pretending the market merely obeys it. It can enjoy the speed of a newsroom while keeping sight of the bodies turned into copy.

Ink arrives at Venice carrying all of these tensions. Its energy may be the way it reaches an audience that would avoid a lecture on press ownership. Its energy may also be the cover under which Murdoch becomes fascinating once again. Both readings can be true in the same frame.

The camera will probably never lose its crush on power. Power has scale, access, costumes and the confidence to stand still for a close-up. Cinema’s job is not to pretend the attraction does not exist. It is to follow the attraction past the face—into the newsroom, through the press and out towards everyone who has to live inside the story.