A companion piece to the hit film, The Social Network, Sorkin's original screenplay tells the true story of how Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a young Facebook engineer, enlists the help of Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a Wall Street Journal reporter, to go on a dangerous journey that ends up blowing the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets.
The Garden Cinema View:
The Social Reckoning is a conventionally constructed film about the real case of the 2021 Facebook files leak and employee Frances Haugen's whistleblowing, but it's no less gripping for it. We more or less already know how exploitative and divisive Facebook's algorithm has become, but we're for hammering the point home all the same. It's a common truth that always slips away from us the moment we're caught inside it.
Mikey Madison is great in what amounts to a counter Anora role, and Jeremy Strong is method-acting in a way his fans will adore and others not so. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed this one himself - a change from The Social Network, which he wrote but David Fincher directed. Maybe that's why it doesn't carry quite the same directorial gravitas, but the key message lands nonetheless.
