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• The True Story Behind the Movie <i>The Report</i>

The True Story Behind the Movie The Report

“Find out exactly what they have and read every word of it.” So says California Senator Dianne Feinstein, played by Annette Bening , to staffer Daniel J. Jones in Amazon’s upcoming political drama The Report. Sen. Feinstein sets Jones, played by Adam Driver , on an investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and “enhanced interrogation” — or torture — of suspected terrorists during the administration of President George W. Bush, ultimately a seven-year project that would nearly take over his life.

Written and directed by filmmaker Scott Z. Burns, The Report chronicles Jones’ real investigation on behalf of the Senate Intelligence Committee into the Bush-era CIA as well as the Senate’s subsequent struggle with the Obama administration to release what Jones uncovered .

Working for Sen. Feinstein, then the Chair of the Committee, Jones and his team reviewed around 6.3 million pages of internal CIA documents and wrote a roughly 6,700-page report on their findings — often referred to as the “torture report” — which remains classified to this day.

In 2014, the Senate voted to release a more than 500-page executive summary , which served as a basis for the film’s script. Some dialogue is even pulled from the summary itself.

The film lays out in graphic detail what Jones discovered: that the U.S. government’s detention and interrogation program was inefficient, needlessly brutal and intentionally hidden from policymakers and the American people.

The Report also depicts how President Barack Obama’s administration — specifically John O. Brennan’s CIA — worked to undermine the Committee’s efforts to make their findings public. Jon Hamm plays President Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who the film suggests repeatedly sided with the CIA after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden improved the President’s chances for reelection.

Burns tells TIME he consulted the work of investigative journalists like Jane Mayer and James Risen, the autobiographies of CIA officials, interviews with military and law enforcement experts on interrogation, and interviews with the senators on the Intelligence Committee. But the primary source for the film was the declassified executive summary itself.

“I made a choice not to say at the beginning of this movie, ‘Based on a true story’. What I chose to say is that, ‘This movie is based on this report,’” Burns explains. “Before we can identify [whether] a story is true or not, we have to identify what the facts of the story are.”

Burns stresses that the report is about facts. “This is the CIA’s own accounting of their program, and it’s an amazing puzzle that Dan [Jones] was able to put together out of 6.2 million documents. And so one would think if there was a narrative that said this program worked, it would’ve been found somewhere in those 6.2 million documents.”

Here’s a brief overview of the real events behind The Report .

What did the “Torture Report” find?

Jones and his team found that between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 detainees were held by the CIA in covert locations around the world, known as “black sites.” The CIA admitted at least 26 of the detainees were “wrongfully” held.

According to the Committee’s executive summary, “interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”

Thirty-nine of the detainees were tortured. The techniques included “walling” (slamming a person against a wall), slaps, nudity, stress positions and sleep deprivation. Some were made to stay awake for as long as a week, and others were told their families were in danger or they were going to be killed. At least five detainees were subjected to unnecessary “rectal rehydration,” and at least three were waterboarded, which simulates the experience of drowning. The report found the interrogations caused “psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm.”

At least one detainee — Gul Rahman — died, possibly because of hypothermia.

Crucially, Jones’ team also found that the interrogations weren’t effective. Seven detainees provided no intelligence at all, and many detainees made up information, creating faulty intelligence. “Other detainees provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques,” the summary continues. Furthermore, Jones’ team found that the CIA exaggerated the effectiveness of the program and misled the White House, Congress and the American public.

The executive summary concludes that the program was mismanaged. What’s more, it was developed by two psychologists — James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, played by Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith in the film — who had no experience as interrogators and lacked specialized knowledge of both al-Qaeda and counterterrorism.

Burns says he was first drawn to this topic after reading Katherine Eban’s 2007 Vanity Fair article “ Rorschach and Awe ”, which examines how Mitchell and Jessen developed the interrogation program. Burns’ parents are both psychologists, and he says he was interested in “the idea that a field of science that had largely existed to explain human behavior and heal people could somehow be used by this.”

The Report features prolonged scenes of Mitchell and Jessen’s interrogations of suspected terrorists, and includes some composite characters, such as Maura Tierney’s CIA official, because names in the executive summary were redacted.

How did the Torture Report come together?

The tapes investigation ( 2007-2009).

The investigation into the CIA’s interrogation program began in 2007, when the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations in 2005. Two years before Feinstein became Jones’ boss, West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he asked Jones to review the CIA documents to determine what was on the tapes.

Before working for Sen. Rockefeller, Jones had been an FBI analyst in the International Terrorism Operations Section. He and former CIA lawyer Alissa Starzak — who doesn’t appear by name in the film — dove into the CIA’s records for two years and delivered a report to the Committee in 2009 on their findings.

“Basically the members [of the Committee] found out that they had been lied to by the CIA,” the real Daniel Jones tells TIME. “That the techniques were far more brutal than they had ever described. That the whole claims of effectiveness related to the [origins of the program] were simply not true. And that there were all these other management failures.”

The larger investigation into the CIA interrogation and detention program ( 2009-2012)

In March 2009, in response to Jones’ report, the Committee voted 14-to-1 to launch a larger investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Sen. Feinstein had become the Chairman of the Committee at this point, and asked Jones to stay on to head up the investigation. He was initially told it would take about a year to complete.

Around the same time, Attorney General Eric Holder announced he was broadening a criminal investigation into the CIA, and as a result, the CIA said that no one within the agency was allowed to speak to Jones’ team. The Republican minority on the committee then pulled their support for the investigation, arguing it couldn’t get far without interviews. Jones and his team of four core members moved ahead, poring over millions of agency documents in a windowless basement room.

Over the years, Jones and his team wrote thousands of pages about what they found. Jones recalls having to beg other staff members to read the report, asking for their help on clarity and checking for typos. “We don’t have editors. It’s just us,” he explains.

They finished that 6,700 page document in 2012.

“The summer from hell” (2013)

Sen. Feinstein sent the report for comment and review by the CIA, other intelligence agencies and the White House. In June 2013, the Committee heard back that the CIA had major problems with the report and claimed it contained inaccuracies. Over the summer, Jones and his team began meeting with the CIA to work through these sections.

Jones describes the period as the “summer of hell.” “We knew what the facts were and we would basically say, you know, ‘The ocean water is blue. Here it is.’ And they would say, ‘No, we think it’s yellow.’ And I’d be like, ‘But here’s the picture, right? It’s blue,'” he explains.

Jones became so frustrated that Feinstein told him to stop meeting with the CIA. Jones remembers Feinstein instructing him to include the CIA’s objections in the footnotes of the summary, “ensuring the world knew the ridiculousness of their response,” he tells TIME.

The CIA files a criminal referral against Daniel Jones and his team (2014)

In early winter, the CIA accused the Senate of illegally accessing an internal review of its detention and interrogation program, known as the “Panetta Review,” and removing it from CIA facilities without authorization. The CIA’s own inspector general then opened a criminal referral after senators accused the CIA of improperly monitoring Jones’ team, per the Times .

In February, the CIA then filed a second criminal referral against Jones and his team, arguing that they hacked into the CIA and took the Panetta Review without permission.

In March, Sen. Feinstein gave a biting 45-minute speech on the Senate floor condemning the CIA’s actions. She confirmed that part of the Review had been copied and moved to the Senate’s office, because the CIA had destroyed the interrogation tapes and the Review had since disappeared off the Committee’s computer system.

Feinstein accused the CIA of conducting an unauthorized search of her staffer’s computer network, saying she was concerned the CIA may have violated the Constitution’s separation of powers principle. She requested an apology, and added that she viewed the criminal referral against Jones’ staff “a potential effort to intimidate.”

John Brennan strongly denied Feinstein’s accusations, saying, “nothing could be further from the truth,” per the Times .

But in July, the CIA’s inspector general found that the agency actually had “penetrated” the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network, and filed the criminal referral against Jones and his team was based on false information. The same day, Brennan apologized.

The Panetta Review came to the same conclusions as Jones’ investigation, but differed from the CIA’s official response . Jones tells TIME he thinks it should never have been withheld from the Committee. Jones says the Review appeared on his computer one day, either by a computer glitch or a whistleblower. He says a lot of documents slipped into the millions they were given access to, some having nothing to do with interrogation. It might have just accidentally come through.

The executive summary comes out ( Winter 2014)

The Department of Justice dismissed the charges against Jones’ team. The executive summary then moved to the White House to determine what should be declassified. It came back heavily redacted, and the senators pushed to include more details and names in the version released to the public.

Finally, after a long back-and-forth with the Obama administration, the Senate released the executive summary on Dec. 9, 2014, shortly before Democrats lost control of the Senate.

“The Senators who are involved are the ones who make things happen,” Jones says. “I was just a staffer. It really takes Senators being courageous.”

In a 2014 op-ed in the Washington Post , Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service whose name appears throughout the report, responded to the Committee’s findings with cutting words. “The report’s leaked conclusion , which has been reported on widely , that the interrogation program brought no intelligence value is an egregious falsehood; it’s a dishonest attempt to rewrite history. I’m bemused that the Senate could devote so many resources to studying the interrogation program and yet never once speak to any of the key people involved in it, including the guy who ran it (that would be me).”

Burns says that these conflicting narratives, between the CIA’s account of what happened and Jones’ discoveries, inform the conflict of the film. He’s interested in the question, “How do these two narratives battle it out in the real world and which one ends up getting purchased in the culture as the truth?”

What happened after the events depicted in The Report ?

The film ends in 2014, after the Senate releases Jones’ findings. But the issues it explores persist in the present day.

In 2015, the Senate passed the McCain-Feinstein Anti-Torture Amendment, which banned any further use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees.

In the spring of 2018, Gina Haspel — who, per the Times , oversaw the torture of a terrorism suspect in Thailand and was involved in the 2005 destructions of the interrogation tapes — was confirmed as the Director of the CIA

During her hearing before the Senate Haspel pledged not to restart the interrogation program.

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Fact-checking 'The Report': How accurate is Adam Driver's post-9/11 CIA thriller?

One of the most intriguing visuals in the political thriller “The Report” is Adam Driver sitting stoically between massive towers of paper – the entire Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture practices after 9/11 – heaped on either side of him.

The guy who sat in that chair in real life reports that a single detail was different. “I did not look as cool as Adam Driver . That's a very tall order,” says Daniel J. Jones, the Senate staffer and lead investigator whose arduous work is at the heart of “The Report” (now streaming on Amazon ). But “if you get out some printer paper and actually stack 7,000 pages, it looks like that.”

“The Report” revolves around Driver’s Jones, his boss Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) and their efforts to bring heinous and ultimately ineffective CIA counterterrorism practices to public light.

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“This is a story about accountability and about how our branches of government interact with each other,” writer/director Scott Z. Burns says. “And that is very much the story of 2019 as well. They're not unrelated.”

Looking back now, Jones calls it “a very interesting life for about seven years, for sure,” as he and Burns discuss the accuracy of key “Report” scenes:

Daniel J. Jones’ team really did work tirelessly in a cramped basement

When Feinstein tasked Jones with digging into the agency's Detention and Intelligence Program in 2007, the CIA wouldn’t let the Senate committee interview officials but made other records available. The base of operations was a compact room in the bowels of a secret Virginia facility that, in actuality, was half as spacious. “It was a basement, no windows, and it had no internet,” Jones recalls. “You couldn't take your phone there. You know when you really get into something and dive deep? It's almost better to not have any of those distractions.”

The film was as accurate as possible in depicting real torture

“The Report” has many flashbacks to the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” developed by two Air Force psychologists that were at the core of Jones’ investigation, including sleep deprivation, waterboarding, mock burials and rectal rehydration. While Burns admits to “a little bit of movie magic,” so things weren't as dangerous for the actors as they appear on screen, he did have Navy SEALs as technical advisers “to make sure they were depicting it correctly.” Burns recalls asking one actor playing a detainee to point out any discomfort: “He said, ‘I’m a Lebanese man and it's really important to me that you show the world what really happened and I want to help with that.' ”

Jones’ work caused a kerfuffle within the CIA

Everybody seemed to take a side on the report: In a restaurant scene, Jones’ breakfast is interrupted by a CIA employee who tells him, “Your (expletive) report will never see the light of day,” but in one Deep Throat-style moment, Tim Blake Nelson plays a CIA medical officer formerly assigned to a detention site who gives Jones info on the sly. “I was approached by all kinds of CIA officers, many of them offering really great details,” Jones says. “But there was also the other end: ‘Hey, this program was great. I'm sure you guys will find that, won’t you?’ We got played on both sides – it's a diverse organization.”

A heated face-off between Jones and the head of CIA did happen

Not surprisingly, the agency had a lot of opinions about Jones’ findings. In 2013, newly confirmed CIA director John Brennan (played by Ted Levine) argues in a meeting with Jones that mistakes were made and addressed, but the “unique” intelligence saved lives and led to the Osama bin Laden raid, with Driver’s character getting testy in response. “I was obviously frustrated with Brennan throughout this process,” Jones says. “He maintains he stood up and objected to the program. We went through 6.3 million pages of records – I found nothing to suggest that.”

The CIA actually filed a criminal referral against Jones

During Jones’ investigation, he discovers a secret internal review by former CIA director Leon Panetta that also found Bush-era torture methods to be largely fruitless and relocates the classified document from the secret facility to his own safe. After the review goes public during a congressional hearing and the CIA enters Jones’ workspace to investigate – a big no-no – the agency files a criminal referral against him. Jones meets with a lawyer about his situation, the charges are dropped, and like Jones back in the day, Driver plays it all pretty cool. However, “I get more freaked out watching the film and thinking about it with some distance,” Jones confesses. “You have such blinders on when you're in an investigation like that.”

Filmmakers made sure the real John McCain got the last words

Feinstein has Jones’ back throughout the entire film, though just as important a champion in real life was Sen. John McCain, who doesn’t appear until the end of “The Report.” “He was always there to offer advice, to push through walls that came up,” Jones recalls. McCain’s eloquent speech in December 2014 commending the Senate’s CIA report was one of the things that made Burns want to make his movie. Instead of getting an actor to play the late senator, Burns thought it’d be more powerful to use a clip of McCain’s actual speech because "he had been such an incredible spokesperson for this issue."

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Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post 9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets. Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post 9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets. Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post 9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets.

• Scott Z. Burns
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• Annette Bening
• 221 User reviews
• 168 Critic reviews
• 66 Metascore
• 4 wins & 13 nominations

• Daniel Jones

• Senator Dianne Feinstein

• Denis McDonough

• John Brennan

• Cyrus Clifford

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• Marcy Morris

• Senate Intelligence Committee Clerk

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• Senator Jay Rockefeller
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Did you know

• Trivia Just before filming commenced, the film's original plan of a 50-day schedule was cut to a 26-day schedule, and its $18 million budget was slashed to just $8 million. Hence, as director Scott Burns stated, all the actors including the lead Adam Driver were paid next to nothing on this project.

Senator Dianne Feinstein : If it works, why do you need to do it 183 times?

• Crazy credits When the title is first shown, it reads, "The Torture Report." Then the second word is "redacted" to reveal the new title: "The Report."
• Connections Featured in CTV News at 11:30 Toronto: Episode dated 8 September 2019 (2019)
• Soundtracks Angel of Death Performed by Slayer Written by Jeff Hanneman (as Jeffrey John Hanneman) Courtesy of American Recordings, LLC under license from Universal Music Enterprises (c) Universal Music-MGB Songs on Behalf of Itself, And Death's Head Music (ASCAP)/100% interest of the Territory

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The U.S. Has Never Held Anyone Accountable for Torture. Daniel J. Jones Is Still Pissed Off About That.

The Senate's lead investigator, Daniel J. Jones, is played by Adam Driver in The Report .

“We tortured some folks,” said the President of the United States in August of 2014, in what was meant to be the kind of Frank Admission a politician will sometimes offer on the weighty issues of the day. Instead, it’s become kind of a meme. Barack Obama’s cocktail of bizarro eartnestitude and relentless folksiness was too much for our irony-soaked Internet culture. But the more you learn about the subject at hand—the CIA’s torture program, the Senate’s report on that program, and whether it was ever going to see the light of day—the less funny it all it is. If you ask the lead investigator on that report, Daniel J. Jones, it really isn’t funny at all.

“People remember that, and rightfully they should, because that’s a ridiculous line,” Jones says. “But what they don’t remember is what comes next, and it pisses me off to this day. He says something to the effect of, ‘It’s important we don’t get too sanctimonious about what these people did. These people are real patriots.’ None of them are patriots. Not the people that came back from torturing and lied about it.”

Jones spent seven years in the basement of CIA headquarters at Langley with a continually shrinking staff of Senate aides, reviewing 6.3 million documents—emails and cables between agents and decision-makers, descriptions of the torture procedures and what they did to detainees, admissions in real time that the program didn’t work and the CIA was lying about it to the Bush administration and the Department of Justice. He sat in that basement and looked at the CIA’s own paperwork—when they weren’t disappearing documents off the Senate server—until he built the story of what happened.

His story is the subject of a new film out Friday, The Report , in which it’s Adam Driver doing the basement reading and, in the end, the politicking. One thing this story will prove to you is that, in the end, every single thing in the Washington, D.C. metro area comes down to politics. The CIA might be a clandestine operation, but they know the power of public relations. Almost as soon as President Obama announced Osama bin Laden had been killed in a Navy SEAL raid in Abbotobad, Pakistan, in 2011, “the Agency’s PR people,” as the film refers to them, were on television linking the nation’s greatest counterterrorism victory of the decade to intelligence supposedly gathered via Enhanced Interrogation Techniques—one of many sickeningly anaesthetic terms swirling around the torture program.

“That was a massively compartmented operation,” Jones tells me of the bin Laden raid. Scarcely anyone, even inside the agency, was abreast of it during the planning phase. Yet a month before the raid was a go, Jones says the CIA looped in their PR team to help craft the narrative linking it to the EITs. As soon as it went public, former Director Michael Hayden and a cast of Agency allies were out in public pushing the line in an attempt to retroactively justify the program. In the film, when Jones told his boss, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (played by Annette Bening), that the narrative was bunk, she called the Obama White House to clarify the bin Laden intelligence was separate from the program. They brushed her off.

“What just happened?” Driver, as Jones, asks Feinstein’s chief of staff when the senator leaves the room.

“The CIA just got the president reelected,” she responds.

Jones says this is a bit of creative license, but the core issue is the same. “They could not have cared less,” he says of the White House. “That is a massive lack of leadership.” Obama was headed into a knock-down drag-out reelection fight, and he’d just landed a giant right hook. He wasn’t going to confuse the public about what had happened.

It’s one of many moments where the Obama administration does not cover itself in glory. White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm), features heavily, and you can almost see the political calculations running behind his eyes while he discusses...anything. McDonough knew Jones for years before the report was set to be released. He knew Jones was no assassin looking to destroy the Agency’s credibility for no reason. And yet, at pretty much every point, the White House sides with or defers to the CIA.

The “we tortured some folks” moment came at a time when the administration was attempting to release a heavily redacted version of the report in August 2014, when DC basically shuts down and people try to bury things in the abandoned swamp. The redactions were so heavy because Feinstein handed the report over to the White House and the White House handed it over to the Agency, which blacked out as much as humanly possible. In the course of events, there are continual crises around the separation of powers, as the Senate’s oversight function falls prey to Executive Branch prerogatives. After all, the same CIA director trying to quash the report—at the time, John Brennan—is giving the presidential briefings and circling up with Obama to plan drone strikes.

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In the end, though, this is the story of how the country lost its mind after the 9/11 attacks. The torture program was the triumph of unreason, the perilous result when you reach a conclusion—we must employ the harshest measures to get information from terrorist suspects in order to prevent the next attack—and then go looking for evidence to support it.

“Zubaydah” is Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee subjected to the program whose story kind of sums up the whole deal. He was first captured by the FBI, and in their custody he gave up some useful information. Law enforcement officers used proven techniques—specifically, rapport-building—and knowledge of Arabic to gain his trust and get the information. But as soon as he was transferred to the CIA, it went from law enforcement to lawlessness. The Agency almost immediately lied to the Justice Department about his level of seniority in al Qaeda to get approval to try out the EITs. And by subjecting suspects to these “techniques,” the CIA destroyed any chance they could be tried in a court of law. Early on in the film, an FBI agent asks how they’re going to build a case against a detainee if they torture him. The evidence would be inadmissible. “Who says he’s getting a trial?” the Jessen character responds. Of course, the film notes that the CIA admitted in the end that one quarter of the 119 people we tortured should never have been detained at all.

There’s a cruel logic to it all, as the Justice Department’s grotesque legal justifications—headlined by John Yoo’s assertion that they could “crush the resticles of the person’s child”—are built on the insane premise that the torture is legal as long as it helps obtain intelligence that will stop terror attacks. “You have to make this work,” Gina Haspel (played by Maura Tierney) tells one of the interrogators in the dank and cavernous corridor of a black site. “It’s only legal if it works.”

Yoo and Haspel are among the many, many people directly involved in the program whose careers have only blossomed afterwards. In fact, no one was held accountable. But Yoo is currently the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at Berkeley and a frequent cable-news guest. Hayden and Brennan are also cable-news mainstays and, in the age of Trump, have garnered Resistance Hero status for pushing back against the president’s assaults on the intelligence community.

“It’s only legal if it works.”

“It’s appalling,” says Jones, who currently leads an investigative consultancy called the Penn Quarter Group and the nonprofit Advance Democracy. “They’re writing books where they’re getting million dollar paychecks, they’re on television as commentators, you’ve got Phil Mudd on CNN all the time, you know, Mike Morell, John McLaughlin, Michael Hayden, John McGoff, all of these people are viewed with some reverence, and some esteem, and brought on TV.” He adds that many are involved with firms that profit from contracts and other ties to the intelligence community. Gina Haspel, of course, is now the CIA director. “The legislative branch bears some responsibility for this, too,” Jones says, pointing out that the same Senate committee that produced the report also confirmed Haspel. Everyone seems to have adopted the Obama administration line, articulated by Hamm’s McDonough: Are we going to save the world, or are we going to look for people to blame? That was also, of course, the attitude towards Wall Street after the economy nearly collapsed.

Those are the kind of American political calculations that prove inevitable, and inevitably destructive. At one point, the film—which was shot beautifully, with relentless pacing, in just 26 days—documents the extended torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who will never be tried for his crimes against humanity because we waterboarded him 183 times and, as the movie shows, administered unnecessary “rectal rehydration.” It is almost debillitatingly gruesome, but the music in the background is not the usual death metal that greets other torture scenes. “Put a feather in his cap and called it macaroni,” a choir of kids sings as interrogators waterboard him yet again. It’s an incredible showcase of the great dichotomy of America: the sunny, patriotic optimism, and the dark and disgusting cruelties we are capable of when we’re governed by fear.

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse , a show about solutions to the climate crisis. 

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The Report review – gripping, fiery drama on CIA torture investigation

Adam Driver and Annette Bening give excellent performances in an utterly absorbing film indicting post-9/11 interrogation practices

I t’s such a rare thrill to see a smart, adult drama like The Report that I left its Sundance premiere on an adrenaline high as if I had just seen the latest Mission: Impossible movie, giddy from the ride I had just taken. What makes this so remarkable is that the film, an exhaustive retelling of the investigation into CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” practices, avoids forcing the facts into Hollywood formula, allowing us to simply bear witness as intelligent people discuss, argue and debate in government offices for two hours.

In crude terms, it might be viewed as a cross between Spotlight and The Post although I’d argue that it’s finer than both of those films, with its laser-tight focus resulting in an audacious unwillingness to entertain extraneous material. We spend the majority of the film with Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), a Senate staffer tasked with building a report on any potential abnormalities in how the CIA interrogated terror suspects after September 11. Dealing with Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), he’s confronted with millions of documents that lead him on a six-year journey to prove major discrepancies and acts of extreme brutality.

The decision to restrict the film’s narrative to the job at hand, rather than say, following Jones home to see the toll his work is taking on his relationship etc, gives The Report a compelling singularity and one that might alienate some viewers. His character is developed via his actions in the workplace rather than his personal life, the point being that, well, Jones didn’t really have one during the time he wrote the report. As a viewer, we’re given a similarly no-nonsense retelling with a dense unveiling of information that requires absolute attention. The film starts on unsure footing with some distracting, on-the-nose dialogue and some all-too-rapid time-jumps but soon settles down, gripping us to our seats for the next two hours.

There are so, so, so many details being shared here yet writer and director Scott Z Burns, best known for collaborating with Steven Soderbergh on Contagion, Side Effects and The Informant!, has ingeniously constructed a film that manages to feel both strict and unsanitised yet utterly absorbing. His script is quite the feat, with brisk, tightly written dialogue filling every corner of every scene without it feeling as suffocating as a latter-day Sorkin might.

Part of this is down to his aforementioned avoidance of cliche, Burns aware that the factual basis of what happened is thrilling enough and for any viewer, like me, who has a fetish for competence porn (that’s watching hugely capable, incredibly smart people carry out difficult tasks with great aptitude), The Report is close to orgasmic. There are so many occasions, especially near the end, when another writer might be tempted to add some flash to a number of confrontations yet simply watching characters outsmart each other using facts or the tenets of the law is so much more satisfying than any added theatrics.

Fresh off his first Oscar nomination for BlackKklansman, Driver is a total natural with often difficult, demanding and intimidatingly wordy material. Like the script, he’s similarly unflashy and unquestionably convincing as a man doggedly following through with his convictions with so many of his info-stuffed monologues deserving quiet applause. It’s a restrained performance that he almost disappears into and acts as further proof of his versatility, dialling back the charm or confidence that might have typified many of his previous roles. As Feinstein, Bening is superb, nailing both her physicality and line delivery while avoiding any sort of broad caricature. It’s such a joy to see them act together, lightly sparring while reeling off Burns’s astute dialogue, and they’re matched by an adept supporting cast, including Jon Hamm , Maura Tierney, Corey Stoll and Michael C Hall.

There’s no heavy hand employed when dealing with the challenging subject matter and Burns also avoids letting anyone off the hook, placing blame for much of what happened and the fallout on both political parties. He flashes back to a number of unflinching torture scenes that are efficient and not exploitative and even finds time for a small dig at Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.

The Report is an angry, urgent film that rarely raises its voice, smartly conveying inhumanity and injustice without unnecessary drama. I found it thrilling.

The Report is showing at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year

• Sundance 2019
• First look review
• Annette Bening
• Adam Driver
• Sundance film festival
• Drama films

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