A very interesting impression … Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy View image in fullscreen A very interesting impression … Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Film Review The Social Reckoning review – Aaron Sorkin’s jittery sequel with all-new evil puppet Zuckerberg Jeremy Strong’s slow-talking Facebook founder turns into a cameo, background to a thriller about a whistleblower that somehow never mentions Trump
Peter Bradshaw Wed 7 Oct 2026 15.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 7 Oct 2026 18.36 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google H ere is a film for all those people who solemnly deplore social media in conversation but haven’t quite got round to deleting their accounts. Sixteen years have gone by since The Social Network , written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher; this was the addictive, obsessive-compulsive movie about the birth of Facebook in Harvard’s macho-competitive cauldron of student sexism and nerdy self-pity, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the fast-talking, arrogant, not-necessarily-evil genius Mark Zuckerberg. Now Sorkin is back with a sequel of sorts, directing his own script – and now Zuckerberg is basically evil, but also weirdly slow talking, as if all the zinging, smart-alecky Sorkinesque dialogue energy of the first film has been siphoned away in early middle age and dispersed among the insurgents in the new cast.
Read more Sorkin’s jittery, funny, syncopated style is unmistakable, as distinctive in its way as David Mamet, although he has one joke about “spatula” being a Yiddish word that he has borrowed from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint . It is the story of how in 2021, Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire was challenged by courageous whistleblower-employee Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, who were on a mission to tell the world how Zuckerberg, scared by falling revenue, changed the algorithm so that engagement was supercharged by rage bait and hate speech, malice and envy. Facebook, moreover, didn’t factcheck political ads, thus driving a huge, nationwide surge in extremist groups and teen bullying and becoming a major player in the Capitol riots. (Having said that, this film does not say aloud the word “Trump” and rather cravenly declines to specify Maga activity.)
Mikey Madison sympathetically plays the unhappy, principled, supersmart Haugen, who is dismissed as a “disrupter” – and Sorkin leaves it to us to notice that this in other circumstances is what oligarchs smugly call themselves. Jeremy Allen White does a capable, unflashy, unrisky job as Horwitz, a stolid performance that perhaps, in sync with the film, tells us about the diligent professionalism of old-school print journalism. And Zuckerberg? Well, we were all hoping and expecting it would be Jesse Eisenberg again. (You’ve heard of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood; this would be Aaron Sorkin’s Techbrohood.) But no: it is Jeremy Strong, who does a very interesting Zuckerberg impersonation, standing and sitting like a Thunderbird puppet, modifying the torpid sadness of his Kendall Roy in TV’s Succession, making this the unhurried contempt of someone simultaneously burdened and energised by knowing he’s richer and therefore smarter than everyone else. (A famous line in The Social Network was “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” This film starts by telli…