Embedded Files
"The Social Reckoning"Written and Directed by Aaron SorkinStarring Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill BurrRated R for languageRuntime: 112 minutesRelease Date: October 9, 2026
Final Thought
Final Thought
Aaron Sorkin's poor direction squanders and flattens his intriguing script for The Social Reckoning.
Aaron Sorkin's poor direction squanders and flattens his intriguing script for The Social Reckoning.
Rating
Rating
★★.5 / 5
★★.5 / 5
Logline
Logline
From Columbia Pictures:
Frances Haugen, a young Facebook engineer, enlists the help of Jeff Horwitz, 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.
Review: Aaron Sorkin Is a Bad Director
Review: Aaron Sorkin Is a Bad Director
Aaron Sorkin, the writer, is loved by Hollywood. Adapted from his own play, his debut screenplay for A Few Good Men in 1992 founded that film as a common modern American favorite. His seven-season series The West Wing won him five Emmys — four for Outstanding Drama Series, one for writing — throughout the early 2000s and established his trademark fast pace. In the early 2010s, his scripts for directors David Fincher and Bennett Miller, The Social Network — the precursor to this film — and Moneyball, both garnered Academy attention, with the former earning Sorkin the coveted Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
In 2017, Aaron Sorkin, the director, was born. I have not yet seen Molly’s Game, his directorial debut — feature or otherwise — but his subsequent features The Trial of the Chicago 7, Being the Ricardos, and now The Social Reckoning all prove one thing: The best person to direct an Aaron Sorkin script is somebody else.
The Social Reckoning follows the investigation by the Wall Street Journal into mega-brand Facebook’s use and exploitation of user data. In 2019, Jeff Horowitz (Jeremy Allen White), an investigative reporter from the world of politics, finds a source in Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a member of Facebook’s civil integrity team; together, they work to build a case against Facebook. Meanwhile, in 2021, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) trains for a separate Senate deposition as Frances’ findings and Jeff’s reporting begin to come to light.
Sorkin is an incredibly verbose, intelligently funny, and almost-always good writer, but his directing style too often gives way to his words. He’s so preoccupied with his actors’ cadence and delivery that he forgets that a film has to look as interesting as its words sound. I am a writer, and as such, always lean pro-Writer. Chicago 7, Ricardos, and Reckoning all carry the proper settings for Sorkin dialogue to flourish, but film is just as much bound to aesthetics as it is the written word. One can’t exist without the other, and Sorkin repeatedly forgets that.
The concept is enticing enough — an All the President’s Men style (in both tone and contemporaneity to its subject) political thriller illuminating the tale of the “Facebook Files” that caused the ubiquitous tech company to rebrand completely.
He should also be interested in telling a visual story: the bland, repetitive shot-reverse-shot nature of his second, third, and this entire film are not conducive to that. The 1976 Alan J. Pakula film utilizes shadow and long-takes to establish an uncompromising, unsettling world of political journalism. There is absolutely no energy in the style of this film, save for important flashback scenes with an eye-roll-inducing black-and-white filter overlaid. I’d venture to say there’s no care for visual storytelling at all, rendering The Social Reckoning as one of the most cinematically uninteresting films of the year.
The script is mostly strong, particularly as it reveals the investigation, the mystery of the extent of Facebook’s wrongdoing and Zuckerberg’s implication in it, but small factors make me fear Sorkin’s tact as a writer to be weakening.
L-R: Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White in "The Social Reckoning"
The prologue — an immediate sign — eventually gives way to an interesting exploration of social media’s role in radicalization, but it is an excruciatingly poor cold open for this film, paid off in a frustrating manner. His characters also too often state the obvious or repeat information learned in the previous scene. As a minor example, during one of Frances and Jeff’s many meetings in the park, rain, plaguing them, stops. The audience is cued visually, but Madison’s Frances then verbalizes to Allen’s Jeff, “Oh look, it stopped raining,” when it would be more effective to simply show the rain stopping. This is also what I mean by his direction giving way to his words: he’s too in love with the sound of his overly prosaic writing. He needs to be reminded of the screenwriting principle, “Show, don’t tell.” To quote Sorkin’s 2010 script, “It’s cleaner.”
The film's third act also centers its pathos on police in an unnerving manner. The film is clearly more concerned with the company’s relationship to politics and the government than, say, social media’s harm to teenagers’ self-images — though it is relevant to the film — but for that tension to be realized in the way this film has begs me to wonder: what does the film think Facebook’s worst assault on society is? That it manipulates users into believing and resharing lies? Or that some cops got hurt?
Jeremy Strong in "The Social Reckoning"
Jeremy Allen White plays his character, an at-times too-obvious audience insert, with a soft charisma that benefits the sarcasm of Sorkin. Jeremy Strong, one of the most believable actors working today, is quite hilarious as the odd Zuckerberg and is careful to keep his role far from caricature. Mikey Madison’s performance unfortunately does not inspire much in me except a reignited befuddlement towards her Oscar win over Demi Moore — as I mentioned multiple times in my coverage that year, she was the best part of Anora, but her performance felt nowhere near as adventurous as that of Moore in The Substance, but I digress.
She’s one of few weaknesses in the film’s ensemble, however, as the remainder of Sorkin’s supporting cast deliver strong performances despite his self-indulgence.
Betty Gilpin and Gbenga Akinnagbe provide great comedy in the film’s Wall Street Journal scenes, while Wunmi Mosaku and Bill Burr (in a surprising appearance) play well against Strong’s power-hungry “weird little guy.” The cast might be the film’s saving grace.
My recent rewatch of Fincher’s The Social Network proto-illuminated Sorkin’s directing issues. The Social Reckoning is well-performed, but it takes immense skill to make people talking endlessly look and feel interesting. Fincher has that, and after four movies, Sorkin doesn’t quite. Outside of that, the film’s shockingly clunky and ill-fitting prologue and insistence on repeating relevant and/or obvious information have me worried that his writing skill is lessening as he hones his directing “skill.”
Director Luca Guadagnino recently made headlines at Venice Film Festival for saying “the idea of the author [has] started to be bastardized,” meaning there’s a growing notion that directors must also be writers to be considered auteurs. “The very important thing that a director does,” he goes on to say, “is to direct,” to which I would add: the most important thing a writer does is write. Aaron Sorkin is a writer, not a director, and that’s fine. I just think he should focus on writing before he becomes bad at both.
Viewed on 10/5/26 at press screening
Published on 10/7/26
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