‘Official Secrets’ On Prime Video: A Gripping Thriller On A British Whistleblower
Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes, is now on Prime Video since August 7 in the U.K. This is a smart and gripping thriller directed by South African filmmaker Gavin Hood, that was theatrically released last October 2019 in the U.K. The story is based on true events about a brave British whistleblower.
Sitting in front of her TV, Katharine Gun is watching an interview with the Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is advocating for war against Saddam Hussein. “Just because you’re the Prime Minister, it doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts,” she shouts at the TV, as she hears him repeat the same lie. The sequence that preceded this scene, and which opened the film, showed Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), already standing in court under trial, prosecuted for disclosing state secrets under the Official Secrets Act, which protects the U.K. from espionage and the leaking of sensitive information. What follows are the events that led Katharine to that courtroom.
Katharine works as a translator at the G.C.H.Q. surveillance unit in Cheltenham, a British security service. She is married to a Turkish Kurd asylum-seeker, Yasar (Adam Bakri). In 2003, she receives a group email from the U.S. National Security Agency asking all personnel to find out incriminating personal details in the lives of UN representatives from certain countries, so that the U.S. and the U.K. would win a vote for war in Iraq.
Appalled by this memo, Katharine leaks the document to a friend, and the email eventually finds itself in the hands of a journalist, Martin Bright (Matt Smith), at The Observer. After the British newspaper checks the validity of this document, it is printed in full on its front page. The story was, however, discredited, after an unfortunate young journalist Nicole Mowbray (Hanako Footman), ran it through spellcheck, replacing all the American spelling with British ones.
Katharine soon confesses to her superiors that she is the whistleblower, and she faces charges against her for breaching the Official Secrets Act. A group of human rights lawyers, headed by Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), comes to her defense.
Katharine Gun is here portrayed as a strong woman, who stands by her principles to save lives from an unnecessary and—as her lawyers demonstrated—illegal war. Katharine’s action, however, did not prevent the Iraq war from happening.
What is remarkable about Gavin Hood’s film is the way that it puts into perspective Katharine Gun’s action. The film shows that what she did could not be called a traitorous act against the government because, as Katharine says herself, she is not working for the government but for the British people. The film makes a clear distinction between government and country (the two terms are not synonymous), and in so doing makes a case as to the reasons why governments should never go unchecked.
This is the job of journalists, the film suggests, in a scene preceding the moment Martin Bright is handed the leaked document. In this sequence near the beginning of the film, at The Observer’s offices, the film shows an argument between the editor and his journalists about the integrity of the newspaper. Reporter Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans) passionately tells the editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill) that they are the press and not a PR agency for Tony Blair, and thus should not take government press releases at face value. Indeed, no newspaper should be a government’s PR agency, but should keep questioning the actions of a given government.
This is an incredible true story, that seems all too relevant today, told in the form of a gripping thriller, with some of the best British actors.
Official Secrets is available to stream on Amazon.
