Snowden

Dir. Oliver Stone | USA / Germany | 134 min | 15

Oliver Stone is an agile and compulsive hacker of official histories, a director who digs deep under the surface of what we are told and asks the big questions about why we are told it. The truth, how it gets framed and who frames it are central preoccupations in his films. So his interest in Edward Snowden – ‘soldier, fugitive, patriot, spy, hacker, traitor, hero’ – is both logical and compelling. Rippling with paranoia, Snowden is a super-charged political thriller opening with the titular subject (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in a hotel room in Hong Kong, preparing to blow the whistle on covert surveillance programmes run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. His collaborators are documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo playing the director of Citizenfour, LFF2014), activist journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Pinto) and later, The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson). In parallel, the film charts Snowden’s rise as an intelligence operative and the development of his romantic relationship with Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), with the tension anchored by a single line of enquiry ‘why?’. This probing instalment in Stone’s ongoing interrogation of systems of power concludes with a particularly prescient answer to its central question – one that casts a dark shadow over the current US presidential race – delivered by Snowden himself.