At the Lido, when the lights of the Sala Grande go down, the noise of the festival seems to disappear for a few moments. There is only the screen, the darkness, and that particular sense of anticipation that precedes every major screening in Venice. It is in this silence that Ink, Danny Boyle’s new film, takes shape, opening the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.

On screen there are no gondolas, no picture-postcard views of Venice, no trace of the glamour that inevitably surrounds a festival like this. Instead, there is paper, printing machinery, crowded newsrooms and men convinced that they can change the way an entire country sees the world. There is something almost paradoxical about a film set in Fleet Street in 1969 opening a film festival in 2026, because the further the story moves forward, the more that apparently distant London begins to resemble our own time.

Ink, directed by Boyle and written by James Graham, tells the story of Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun and the transformation of the newspaper under the leadership of Larry Lamb, but it does not simply reconstruct a chapter in the history of British journalism.

What Boyle brings to the screen is the precise moment when information begins to understand that it can become entertainment, and entertainment discovers that it can become a form of power.

Sitting in the theatre, the sensation is that of watching a machine being built. At first, it almost feels like a game: finding a different formula, speaking to a new audience, breaking the rules of a press establishment perceived as too distant from ordinary people. Then the machine begins to accelerate, and it becomes increasingly difficult to stop. Boyle films it with his characteristic energy, turning the newsroom into a living, noisy, frenetic organism, driven by ideas and conflicts. There is almost never the feeling that we are simply watching a period reconstruction. The past is pushed towards the present until it becomes impossible not to recognise something of our own everyday world in these characters and in the tools they use.

Guy Pearce steps into the role of Rupert Murdoch without resorting to caricature. His Murdoch is still a man on the rise, an outsider looking at an apparently immovable system and identifying the cracks within it. Perhaps that is the most effective aspect of Pearce’s performance: he does not play the character with the knowledge of what Murdoch will eventually become, but instead gives him the hunger, ambition and even the ability to charm that could make him convincing to the people around him.

During the Venice press conference, Pearce revealed a particularly curious response from the Murdoch family: Elisabeth Murdoch had apparently told him that her father was very pleased that Pearce was playing him, although Rupert Murdoch had not yet seen the film.

The remark, made during the presentation of a film about the construction of media power, almost feels like a small additional scene from Ink. Alongside him, Jack O’Connell plays Larry Lamb, the man destined to turn Murdoch’s intuition into a genuine editorial revolution.

If Murdoch has the vision, Lamb understands how to make it real. Their relationship is the engine of the film: two very different men united by the belief that the old way of doing journalism is no longer enough. Lamb understands the audience and realises that a newspaper must be immediate, provocative and accessible; Murdoch sees the economic and political potential of that formula. It is in the meeting of these two ambitions that Ink finds its tension. And as we watch a new way of making a newspaper being born, it becomes natural to think about everything that came afterwards: television, rolling news channels, websites, social media and, today, artificial intelligence. The tools have changed, but the battle for attention remains the same.

Claire Foy, playing Jules Davies, introduces a different perspective into the heart of the newsroom, that of a journalist working in a male-dominated environment who understands perfectly the power contained in the words that eventually reach the front page. Her character, created for the film and inspired by the experiences of several female journalists from Fleet Street at the time, allows the story to move beyond the simple confrontation between Murdoch and Lamb and to question who actually produces the news.

Ink ultimately shifts its focus towards the people who create the stories and the power that comes with deciding what deserves to be seen, read and remembered. It is one of the film’s strongest ideas, because it slowly moves the centre of the story. Ink appears to be about Murdoch, but gradually becomes a film about us. About those who choose one front page over another. Those who buy a newspaper. Those who click. Those who share. Those who decide that one story deserves attention while another does not.

The film reminds us that the power of the media does not come only from those who own it, but also from the audience that sustains it. That is why, despite being set more than half a century ago, Ink feels so strikingly contemporary inside the Sala Grande at the Lido.

The printed newspaper we see on screen belongs to an almost archaeological world compared with the speed at which information now circulates, but the fundamental question remains unchanged: what do we want to see? What do we want to read? And, above all, how much are we willing to believe of what is put in front of us?

Danny Boyle does not seem interested in offering simple answers. He does not turn Murdoch into a conventional villain, nor does he present the birth of the new Sun as a revolution that was either entirely positive or entirely negative. The film’s strength lies precisely in its ambiguity. A revolution can begin with an innovative idea while simultaneously containing the seeds of its own consequences.

When the screening finally comes to an end, the Venetian audience greets Ink with a standing ovation lasting around five minutes. But the feeling that lingers on leaving the theatre is not simply that of having witnessed the story of a newspaper. It is rather the sensation of having watched something being born that, more than fifty years later, continues to shape our relationship with reality.

Outside the Sala Grande, Venice begins making noise again: the festival, the photographers, the conversations, the cars, the constant movement of the Lido. But the film continues to work somewhere in the background. Because the real protagonist of Ink is not only Rupert Murdoch, nor Larry Lamb, nor even the newspaper they transformed together. It is the idea that once a story is printed, it can alter the perception of the person reading it.

And perhaps that is the point Danny Boyle chooses to make as he opens Venice: before screens, before algorithms and before social media, all it took was ink to begin a revolution. The rest, as always, is done by the audience.