THE STORY – Frances Haugen (Madison), a young Facebook engineer, enlists the help of Jeff Horwitz (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 CAST – Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr & Jeremy Strong
THE TEAM – Aaron Sorkin (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 112 Minutes
Allegedly, according to the linear trajectory of time, 2010 was 16 years ago. But unquestionably, it feels like we’ve packed about a century’s worth of events, progression, and regression into that decade-and-a-half between the release of “The Social Network” and its follow-up “The Social Reckoning.” Least of all that’s changed is the public’s perception of social media. What once felt like a novel way to connect, encouraging the sharing of personal details and memorable moments, has morphed into a tool that unquestionably does more harm than good. Nearly everyone feels the regular need or desire to delete their online presence and move off the grid, but few except the strongest and most centered individuals actually do. Like cigarettes and alcohol, everybody knows social media is bad for you, but just as with those vices, it’s so hard to stop using once you’ve begun.
Aaron Sorkin clearly understands this. With “The Social Reckoning,” he’s both director and writer (genius perfectionist David Fincher brought Sorkin’s Oscar-winning “The Social Network” screenplay to life). Whereas his 2010 masterpiece mostly looked at the tech wizards who built Facebook with a degree of resentful fascination, it was, by today’s standards, fairly neutral on the social media site itself, mainly using its creation and take-off to explore what success can do to an individual and to a friendship. “The Social Reckoning” has no such patience; Sorkin sees the damage Facebook (and its competitors) has done to our global society in just a few years, and he’s unsparing in his assessment. The film’s central figure/alarm-raiser, Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), repeatedly says she believes in her employer, Facebook, and views its goal of connecting people as “virtuous”. It’s a sentiment that could’ve been declared earnestly in the 2010 film, but here, her assessment is portrayed as heartbreakingly naive. In the same way, perhaps the biggest issue with Sorkin’s approach in “The Social Reckoning” is the way his script treats its revelations like, well, revelations. The moments of would-be shocking truth bombs instead fizzle out given the audience’s I-know-it’s-bad-for-me-but attitude toward social media.
Frances is a data engineer who’s essentially the ideal Facebook user: awkward and struggling to make meaningful in-person connections, but smart and technologically savvy. She works at Facebook on their so-called civic integrity team. After seeing a video of a former acquaintance unleashing a vitriolic, right-wing-tinged tirade against two police officers, she becomes compelled to find the source of this person’s sudden about-face from progressivism to the alt-right. It turns out, the company that pays Frances’s bills was responsible for her radicalization. This alarms her, in no small part because her job is to monitor Facebook groups for the exact kind of troubling behavior that transformed her friend. In hopes of bringing positive change to a company she loves, but one that she knows doesn’t respond well to criticism, she turns to Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), the Wall Street Journal’s newest tech reporter. What starts as a small, reluctant correspondence with the press eventually spirals into an exposé of something far more insidious and dangerous being deliberately carried out from within the impenetrable walls of Mark Zuckerberg’s trillion-dollar company.
To those who love his work, Aaron Sorkin’s latest screenplay is a predictable source of delightfully elevated language, hilariously convoluted analogies, and seemingly random but thematically relevant asides and anecdotes. If you find his writing obnoxiously ostentatious, “The Social Reckoning” won’t convert you to Team Sorkin. But as in this film’s predecessor, the flowery, attention-grabbing dialogue makes sense in context. In “The Social Network,” most of the characters are pompous, braggadocious Harvard students, all constantly trying to one-up their peers with their verbal dexterity, much as Sorkin often seems to be doing himself. And here, most of the characters either work in tech or journalism, two professional realms that, hypothetically, both require and attract high-level thinkers; in other words, the rapid-fire speech patterns and extravagant sentence structures don’t feel entirely unnatural. Not that Sorkin has ever positioned himself as a writer attempting to capture reality through his writing. Although his directorial efforts are based on real-life figures or events, his screenplays elevate nonfiction into a realm of fantastical pseudo-reality usually reserved for imagined stories. With “The Social Reckoning,” his writing turns what could be a dry, procedural story with a shadow of light espionage into something much more entertaining and, perhaps unexpectedly, funny.
But the moments in the script that are clearly aiming for a laugh are unquestionably its weakest spots. With “The Social Network,” Fincher kept the film zooming along at fiber-internet speed. He rarely let laugh lines linger, never letting the jokes or clever phrasing distract from the chilly tone and efficient pace. (Just think of the way Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg tosses off the pluralized proper noun “Winklevi”.) With “The Social Reckoning,” Sorkin has no collaborator to prevent him from highlighting, underlining, and bolding his proudest moments as a writer. Some of the humor works, usually when Madison is tasked with delivering it (although the always-great Betty Gilpin, playing Jeff’s curt boss, gets the biggest laugh in the film). But too often, they fall uncomfortably flat. One joke about Frances confusing “metro,” as in “metro reporter,” with “metrosexual” is a groaner and unintentionally makes Frances look uncharacteristically dumb. (And when was the last time anyone said “metrosexual”?) And one prolonged back-and-forth between Frances and Jeff about mansplaining evokes nothing but full-body cringe.
By telling a story about contemporary, Internet-based issues and misbehavior, the film immediately feels dated. The film takes place from 2019 to 2021 (and yes, that means we get not only COVID as a plot point, but also a climactic sequence involving the January 6 insurrection), but because of Sorkin’s penchant for the dramatic, the five-year-old revelations and insights are treated like breaking news rather than something that’s already known. The best films about journalism (think “Spotlight” or “All the President’s Men”) treat the shocking facts uncovered by their reporter characters as appropriately staggering for the figures in the movie, but don’t try to act as if the audience isn’t already aware of what’s being revealed. Not so with “The Social Reckoning.” Even if viewers aren’t fully cognizant of the exact, specific points that were detailed in the real WSJ series that would go on to be called “The Facebook Files” (the repeated point that 64% of users who join extremist Facebook groups were sent there by the algorithm itself is a startling one), it’s unlikely that anyone watching will be approaching the film with an optimistic idea of the practices carried out by the tech companies behind social media platforms like Facebook. Indeed, Frances’s question of who or what curdled her friend’s ideology unintentionally plays out like the “I Think You Should Leave” sketch where a hot dog costume-wearing Tim Robinson screams, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” about a hot dog vehicle accident.
“The Social Reckoning” marks Mikey Madison’s first film since her Oscar-winning performance in 2024’s “Anora.” Here, she plays a character who wouldn’t be caught dead in the outfits that Anora favored. Her Frances is shy and introverted, struggling to make friends and showing little patience for those who can’t keep up with her, including Jeff. Madison inhabits her character as completely and believably as she did in her star-making turn as a Brooklyn stripper, proving herself to be a versatile actress with the potential for a robust, varied career ahead of her. She’s charming and sympathetic, with her social awkwardness serving as a frequent punchline (she never seems to know how to dress for her surreptitious meetings with Jeff), but the screenplay never makes her feel like a target of contempt. Although Madison delivers one important monologue in which Frances reveals her doubts about Facebook’s virtues, she comes across as slightly overwhelmed by the scene’s corny, repetitive writing; this speaks more to the director abandoning her in the moment than to any poor performance choices by the actress.
Jeremy Allen White makes for a sturdy counterpart to Madison, but he feels overshadowed by her performance and underserved by the writing of his character. As the closest thing the film has to an audience surrogate, he asks a lot of questions and needs a lot of explanations, which helps viewers but doesn’t give the actor many opportunities to stand out. As Zuckerberg, the infamously intense Jeremy Strong is perfectly cast. Spending nearly the entire movie in a mock Congressional hearing, it feels as if we’re watching the actor deconstruct his character in real time as Zuckerberg’s physical and vocal choices are picked apart and assessed by his colleagues. Strong is, unsurprisingly, cold and impersonal; his Zuckerberg feels like the natural next step from Eisenberg’s portrayal of the tech giant in “The Social Network.” Here, Strong’s guarded characterization feels like a doubling-down on Zuckerberg’s unfiltered personality from the 2010 film. Strong portrays him with a misanthropic core hardened into entitled, haughty dismissiveness, theoretically because his unimaginable success has vindicated him and given him no reason to change. The wonderful Wunmi Mosaku is a standout as Raya, one of Zuckerberg’s legal experts and crisis managers, tasked with coaching him through his hearing preparations. Mosaku is a natural at handling Sorkin’s dialogue, consistently placing the perfect emphasis on precisely the right words to make his lines sing.
With “The Social Reckoning,” Sorkin serves up yet another delicious piece of writing. But as has consistently been the case since he took up directing his own screenplays, the lack of an outside party to act as a second pair of eyes on his more indulgent tendencies as a writer is a notable problem. As always, his writing is slick and propulsive, but his direction is not. And while it’s a damning depiction of the dangerous decisions unregulated tech companies love to make, it didn’t make me want to immediately delete all of my social media accounts, simply because none of what it explores feels surprising. But it did make me want to rewatch “The Social Network.”
