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Equally, though, as Graham himself suggested at the press screening, Cummings recalls Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network : a scornful, socially awkward man, driven to disrupt the world but without anything approaching a moral purpose. Cumberbatch, it has to be said, is completely compelling, his mercurial charisma coloured with misanthropic despair. When the Leave win is announced, he breaks the fourth wall with an apprehensive glance to camera that suggests a man only finally considering the monster he has unleashed.
In fact, the ultimate story here is not really Leave vs Remain, though that race is covered grippingly, like a thriller, with the former camp’s fantastical exploitation of disaffection and xenophobia set off by the latter’s misguided belief in “the facts”. It is a more universal face-off: that between the new technocracy, as represented by Cummings and his data-mining chumsat shadowy organisation AggregateIQ, and the old political establishment, whether that be the dinosaur Eurosceptic MPs or Rory Kinnear’s harried Remain campaign director Craig Oliver.
The Leave Side’s heavy deployment of micro-targeted online adverts, and their related use of people’s personal data, not to mention overspending (the latter unmentioned here), is a subject that continues to face journalistic and legal scrutiny. But, criminal or not, no one could surely come away from this drama seeing such an operation as anything other than a malign new path for our democracy.
It’s not perfect, of course – for how could any aspiring explanation of such monumental wrongness be that? Notably, the characterisation is less assured when it comes to more famous supporting players. From Boris, with his Party Warehouse wig and too youthful demeanour, to that gruesome twosome Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, they’re familiar, student-revue caricatures. Andyes, cartoons is what they may purport to be in real life, but to continually portray them as such only plays into their hands.
That aside, what Graham has produced is an engrossing second draft of history, one that amid all the continuing mayhem offers some kind of manageable perspective on a raging nation governed by charlatans and manipulated by algorithms. The whole thing is summed up by the soundtrack’s eerie, cacophonous take on Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory”. Make that our new national anthem, I say, as the ugliness drones on. Support free-thinking journalism and subscribe to Independent Minds
