Director: Bill Condon
Talent: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Carice van Houten, Alicia Vikander
Release Date: 6th December 2013
The Fifth Estate is the story of the disorderly professional relationship between Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), the founder of Wikileaks, and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), his former protégé, set against a backdrop of recent political havoc in which the organization found itself often at the center. While the film is seemingly critical of Assange’s egocentricity, with several characters remarking on his inclination to have made Wikileaks ‘all about himself’, the most vigorous validation it can muster for its position is a vague ‘because arrogance is bad’, rather than acknowledging the power structures in which its players operate, and to which they are subject. Thus, whistleblowers in police custody become ‘informants’, not victims of the aggressive conditions of justice designed to generate such. In attempting to expose its subject, to dismantle Assange’s cult of personality (or at least diminish it), The Fifth Estate reifies the very conditions predisposed to imitate it.
Words by Oisín Murphy-Hall
