There are books that become victims of their own accuracy — quoted so often that the quotations begin to live separately from the text, turning into memes, into laptop stickers, into the names of rock bands. Orwell's 1984 is the foremost victim of this process. "Big Brother is watching you," say people who have never read the book; "doublethink" is invoked in political conversations by those who could not explain what Orwell actually meant. The task of Raoul Peck — the Haitian director whose I Am Not Your Negro and Death in Haiti long since became models of political documentary — was to return the text its original cutting force. And to a considerable degree, he has succeeded.

"Orwell: 2+2=5" is a film made in the year of Trump's second coming. Peck cuts archival footage with contemporary reportage, fragments of the novel with the speeches of actual politicians, descriptions of the Ministry of Truth with press conferences from an actual White House. The effect produced by this montage is difficult to describe more precisely than as "déjà vu raised to the power of dread": you watch newspeak cease to be a literary invention and become a working tool, deployed by ministers, advisers, and spokespeople — who may never have read Orwell but have instinctively mastered his mechanics.

Peck — a director schooled on Marcuse and Gramsci, capable of turning ideological analysis into cinematic experience — thinks in montage the way a historian thinks: knowing that history rhymes not because it lacks imagination but because power has a short memory and a long appetite. The film moves at an escalating tempo that initially seems didactic and by the midpoint has become almost panicked: fact piles upon fact, quote upon quote, year upon year — until it begins to seem that Orwell described not a dystopia but a manual, which someone found and began methodically to follow.

The film's strongest moment is when Peck stops and falls silent. Literally: several seconds without text, without music, without archive. Only faces — contemporary, ordinary, televisual faces of people saying things that Orwell put in the mouth of O'Brien. And this silence is the most precise critique of the contemporary information noise.

The film has a sore point that must be addressed: Peck sometimes trusts too readily in the self-evidence of his comparisons. The intellectual audience the film addresses already knows about Orwell and Trump. The audience that needs it explained is unlikely to find itself at a screening of political documentary in the Palais des Festivals at Cannes. The gap — between the intended addressee and the actual viewer — is the old ailment of the left political film, and Peck has not entirely recovered from it. But — and this is important — he at least understands the problem: his film does not read a sermon and does not offer solutions. It only asks: do you recognise this? Have you seen this before? And if so — what do you intend to do?

The question is rhetorical.