Danny Boyle’s “Ink” opened the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Wednesday night, launching an awards-season drama that reconstructs how Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb turned a failing broadsheet into Britain’s best-selling tabloid. The film competes for the Golden Lion, marking Boyle’s first bid for Venice’s top prize.
Jack O’Connell plays Lamb, the Yorkshire-born newsman Murdoch poached from the Daily Mirror in 1969 to run The Sun. Guy Pearce portrays Murdoch, and Claire Foy appears as journalist Jules Davies. James Graham adapted the screenplay from his own 2017 stage play, tracing the paper’s rise through stunts, scandal and the Page 3 nudity that redefined tabloid journalism and later shaped Murdoch’s American ventures at the New York Post and Fox News.
Boyle called the project “the oddest film that’s ever opened Venice” during a pre-festival tribute where he received Variety’s Creative Impact in Directing Award. He credited festival director Alberto Barbera for “courage” in selecting the film and reunited with producer Tessa Ross, his collaborator on the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire.”
At Tuesday’s press conference, Boyle turned from the newspaper’s history to journalism’s uncertain future, warning that artificial intelligence could soon generate reporting cheaply and at scale. He questioned whether an AI-produced newsroom would challenge the power structures that created it or simply serve them.
O’Connell described Lamb as a character consumed by circulation figures, willing to bend convention to keep that number rising. He called the finished film a striking statement on British culture and credited Boyle’s rare ability to pull audiences inside a world rather than merely show it to them.
Netflix and Studiocanal released the first trailer ahead of the premiere, showing Sun staffers pitching sensational stories about crime and sex to chase readership, then confronting the costs as ambition overtakes restraint. Studiocanal will distribute the film theatrically across the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Benelux countries, Australia and New Zealand. In the U.S., “Ink” opens in select theaters Dec. 11 for an Oscar-qualifying run before streaming on Netflix starting Jan. 8.
