Orwell 2+2=5

TIFF REVIEW: BY KURT MORRISON

September 14, 2025

3.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

The Toronto International Film Festival is often a stage for boundary-pushing documentaries, works that seek not only to inform but to provoke, to reframe what we think we know about history, culture, or the people who shaped both. Among this year’s premieres, Orwell: 2+2=5 stood out immediately for its ambition: a documentary centered not broadly on George Orwell’s life, but specifically on his final years, when illness and urgency collided with genius as he completed his defining novel, 1984.

For decades, Orwell has been treated less as a man than as a cultural symbol—his name shorthand for surveillance, authoritarianism, and political doublespeak. Orwell: 2+2=5 attempts to bridge that gap, to pull him back down from abstraction and reintroduce him as a writer of flesh, blood, and bone, struggling against time. The film succeeds in reminding us that behind the myth of “Orwell” was Eric Arthur Blair, a frail, grieving widower, isolated on the Isle of Jura, coughing blood as tuberculosis consumed him, yet refusing to stop writing. This is the heart of the documentary, and when it lingers there, it is fascinating, harrowing, and often moving.

The film is rich in biographical and historical detail. We are guided through Orwell’s deteriorating health, his difficult decision to retreat to the rugged Scottish island in search of peace, and the psychological burden of knowing his body might give out before his manuscript was finished. Archival footage and letters fill in the textures of his daily existence, while interviews with scholars contextualize the broader political backdrop of the late 1940s. These segments work beautifully, grounding the viewer in both the intimate and the global: the loneliness of a man staring at a typewriter in a damp farmhouse, and the anxiety of a world grappling with the aftermath of war and the looming specter of totalitarianism.

For viewers unfamiliar with Orwell beyond the classroom readings of Animal Farm and 1984, the documentary offers an accessible introduction. For long-time readers or admirers, it provides something equally valuable: a close-up of the stakes at play in Orwell’s final year. His work was not abstract theorizing. It was the urgent, almost desperate act of a dying man, trying to leave behind a warning to the world. The film captures that urgency, reminding us that 1984 was written under conditions that would have broken many others.

And yet, as insightful as the film often is, its flaws are difficult to ignore. The most pressing issue is its structure. Orwell: 2+2=5 is, at times, frustratingly clunky and uneven, as if unsure of how best to stitch together the different materials it deploys. Instead of developing a clean, coherent narrative thread, the film frequently jumped between timelines, tones, and mediums, leaving me occasionally disoriented.

Much of this disjointedness comes from the director’s reliance on film and television clips drawn from various adaptations of Orwell’s work. Scenes from multiple versions of Animal Farm and 1984 are intercut throughout, meant to highlight the timeless relevance of Orwell’s themes. The problem is not the clips themselves—they are often fascinating reminders of how often and how differently Orwell’s stories have been interpreted—but their overuse. At times, the documentary feels less like a portrait of Orwell and more like a collage of adaptations, a patchwork that pulls attention away from the man and disperses it across decades of cultural reimaginings. The effect is jarring. Just as the film begins to build emotional momentum in recounting Orwell’s struggles, it swerves into another dramatization, leaving the central story fragmented.

Instead of reinforcing the man’s legacy, the constant shifting between dramatizations, adaptations, and analysis fractures the film’s pacing and at times makes it difficult to stay engaged with the central story of Orwell himself. This reliance on cinematic echoes of Orwell’s novels also risks overshadowing the more powerful material: Orwell’s own words, his deteriorating health, and the stark reality of his final days. Whenever the documentary slows down and simply lets his writing speak, or when it focuses on his increasingly fragile body pushing against the inevitability of death, it finds a clarity and emotional weight that lingers. Unfortunately, these moments are too often interrupted and dilute the emotional core of the documentary.

The film also succeeds in prompting viewers to reflect on why Orwell’s ideas continue to resonate so powerfully. By revisiting 1984 in the shadow of his imminent death, the documentary underscores the novel’s status not simply as a work of fiction or as a warning letter, written under duress, for the generations to come and also as an observation of the surveillance state that already existed in his present and exaggerated it to make the metaphor more obvious.

This stylistic choice may have been motivated by an admirable ambition: to show not only Orwell’s life but also the enduring afterlife of his words. But the execution falters. Rather than illuminating his legacy, the clips often muddy the waters, leaving the audience to piece together disparate fragments into something coherent. In trying to say too much—about Orwell the man, Orwell the writer, Orwell the myth—the documentary risks saying less than it could.

Still, it would be unfair to dismiss Orwell: 2+2=5 outright. When it quiets down, allowing Orwell’s voice (through his writing and letters and narrated by the wonderful Damian Lewis) to dominate, the film is gripping. There are passages where his words—sharp, precise, satirical, prophetic—are laid against the stark images of his isolated farmhouse, or even of current Geopolitical landscapes and suddenly the clunkiness disappears and I, the viewer, got goosebumps. In those moments, the documentary achieves a clarity that justifies its existence.

As a festival experience, Orwell: 2+2=5 feels emblematic of TIFF’s documentary programming: ambitious, sometimes messy, but always thought-provoking. The film is not polished enough to be definitive, nor is it likely to become the last word on Orwell on screen. But it offers valuable insights, a strong sense of place and time, and, above all, a reminder of the extraordinary circumstances under which 1984 came to be.

Ultimately, Orwell: 2+2=5 is a film at war with itself. On one hand, it delivers a vivid and informative account of Orwell’s final days, drawing attention to the human cost behind one of the most important novels of the 20th century. On the other hand, it undermines its own momentum with structural choices that fragment rather than unify.

For those willing to navigate its uneven storytelling, however, the rewards are there. The film captures the urgency of Orwell’s final chapter and the weight of his achievement, even if it doesn’t always present them with the clarity they deserve. And in the end, perhaps that tension is fitting. Orwell himself lived a life marked by contradiction—an aristocrat who became a socialist, a colonial policeman who became an anti-imperialist, a sick and dying man who produced a work that feels immortal. Orwell: 2+2=5 may be imperfect, but it leaves us with an image of Orwell that is raw, flawed, and deeply human.