“Official Secrets” is the espionage thinker you didn’t know you needed

This whistleblower drama is not only prescient, it’s one of the most underrated movies of the year

Official Secrets is a movie about ordinary people. I think that’s what I loved most about it. This is a world of bureaucrats, journalists, attorneys, and average folks on the outer peripheries of power. Not presidents, not prime ministers or attorney generals. These are people who had nothing to gain by standing up for what they believed in, and everything to lose. They did not change the world. They just tried to make it a better place.

This is the story of Katharine Gun, a real-life whistleblower who in 2003 leaked a memo proving that the United States and United Kingdom were manipulating intelligence to “lie their way into a war” with Iraq. Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?

The movie tries to make it seem that way, dramatizing what was really a pretty banal action. Gun copies and pastes an email (woah!), then saves a copy onto an external hard drive (omg!), takes that hard drive over to a printer (I can’t watch!), prints a copy (stop! wait!), and then (dun dun dun!) mails it to a friend. All the tense music, slow motion and closeup shots in the world can’t make that look cool.