I think I have admitted here before that I’ve never been very good at maths. Even so, I am pretty certain that I know what two plus two is. That never really seemed very important, but the film I watched yesterday afternoon with John revealed just how consequential it in fact is.

We went to see Orwell: 2+2=5, a 2025 film directed by Raoul Peck, and as I wheeled out of the Curzon cinema I honestly thought I had a new favourite film. I don’t think I have ever seen a more beautiful, intriguing filmic text. To just call it a film or even a biopic would be to over simplify it. It may be about George Orwell, but it is also about much, much more. Peck juxtapositions Orwell’s writing with contemporary politics, enabling it to speak to our world. The result is phenomenally powerful, as if a voice from eighty years ago was able to accurately predict and comment on what is happening today. Freedom has become slavery, war has become peace, and ignorance has indeed become strength in a way Orwell could never have imagined but predicted with chilling precision.

Riding the Lizzie Line home last night though, I began to wonder what I was going to say about this masterpiece. It is a very cinephiliac film: that is to say, it revels in the cinematic art, referencing countless other films and reminding me what cinema is for. It made me realise how little I know about George Orwell, and made me ravenous to know more. After all, he was a contemporary of Hemingway, Fleming and Tolkien, and just as influential as all three, but I have never really studied him. This will sound like a bit of a cop-out, but I honestly don’t think confining my thoughts to a blog entry would do the film justice: I now feel the urge to go far, far deeper, exploring a writer who was clearly one of the greatest of the twentieth century, yet who I know so little about. In a way, Peck’s film whetted my appetite and made me hungry for more. It really is an astonishingly great film which I would urge everyone to watch, saying so much about both Orwell and the present; but the cool part is, it was just the beginning. It feels like it has opened up a completely new realm for me to now dive into and explore.

We may well live in a world where two plus two might soon equal five, and where everything Orwell warned us against may soon become reality; but as long as films like this are being made, and as long as we remain aware of the threat posed by Big Brother, we should be all right.