Los Angeles, CA – Tech CEOs are among the most terrifying products of 21st-century civilisation, largely because we have somehow convinced ourselves—willingly or otherwise—to vest unprecedented political and cultural power in a bunch of sniveling men whose only qualification for exercising it is the pathological inability to imagine a world in which they are not the most important person in the room. October has become 2026’s month to literalise the horrors of Silicon Valley, with Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman sketch Artificial, Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary Musk, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes project You Can See Everything, and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning lining up to anatomise this peculiar species of megalomania.
Returning to the Facebook empire he helped immortalise in David Fincher’s impeccable The Social Network, Sorkin has inherited a sequel nobody asked for after failing to secure either Fincher in the director’s chair or Jesse Eisenberg back as the Harvard sociopath. Unfortunately, Sorkin’s directorial instincts remain so woefully underdeveloped that even the sharpness of his own dialogue seems to lose its lustre the moment he puts it in front of a camera. Sixteen years later, Sorkin is drawn back to the company’s sins through the Facebook Files—the Wall Street Journal‘s 2021 investigative series, which drew on internal documents to expose how Facebook’s own research identified the harms associated with its products.
Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who leaks internal material to investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), while Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) prepares for congressional scrutiny. Divided into three acts tracing the discovery of Facebook’s internal failures, the investigation that brings them to light, and the political fallout culminating in the January 6 Capitol attack, the film has no shortage of consequential material, but it seems to labour under the delusion that stringing together a series of incriminating revelations automatically amounts to compelling cinema.
Sorkin’s problem is that he has become so enamoured of his own intellectual and moral authority that his writing has become an elaborate exercise in self-congratulation. I think Mikey Madison is a brilliant actress who keeps finding herself underserved by filmmakers who seem to have lost the plot, and it is frustrating to see her Oscar-winning talents funnelled into yet another film that feels beneath both her and the filmmaker responsible for it. The man of the hour is inevitably Jeremy Strong, who after delivering a delectably contemptuous portrait of Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, arrives here with what could have been a career-defining opportunity. Instead, Strong’s notoriously method interpretation of Zuckerberg is so painstakingly mannered that it has turned into one of the most contrived performances of his career.
But the film’s most damning failure is how utterly spineless Sorkin’s brand of social-justice filmmaking has become. His treatment of January 6 is even more revealing, with repeated recreations of the Capitol attack somehow making the whole affair feel nothing more than an extended exercise in police victimhood. For a Hollywood-scaled exposé to ostensibly lay bare Meta’s role in the industrial-scale monetisation of public dysfunction and radicalisation, this is a spectacularly anaemic reckoning. Sorkin really, really wants to position himself alongside All the President’s Men and Spotlight, but all The Social Reckoning really accomplishes is exposing his lukewarm, neoliberal sensibilities, which is perhaps the worst possible combination when paired with his egregious limitations as a director. The Social Reckoning is currently running in theatres.
