The Social Reckoning (2026)

The Social Network ended on a lonely young man at a laptop, refreshing a page and waiting for someone to click a button. Sixteen years on, Aaron Sorkin has written a companion piece about what happened when billions of people followed him. A sharp idea, and a dangerous one. The first film had a creation myth to lean on, with a hero who might also have been a villain, and a story about consequences gets no such luxury. Ben Mezrich’s book gave the first film licence to invent; the Facebook Files gave this one documents and named people who can be checked against the record, which narrows what a screenwriter may do with them.

David Fincher directed the original; Sorkin wrote it. This time Sorkin directs his own script, and Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, the Facebook insider who enlists a Wall Street Journal reporter, Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), to help her get thousands of internal documents into public view. Jeremy Strong replaces Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg.

Fincher’s absence shows. He and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth gave the original its cold, nocturnal pulse, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross took an Oscar for the score. Cronenweth returns, but Alexandre Desplat now composes. Sorkin’s three earlier films as director (Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Being the Ricardos) were driven by the script first and the image second, and this one follows suit. The look is clean and efficient where the original was seductive, and I missed the seduction. Sorkin does best inside the company itself, among its executives and lawyers.

The casting looks like the film’s best argument on paper: Madison won an Oscar for Anora, and White and Strong bring The Bear and Succession with them. Madison anchors the film and gives the documents a human face. Strong’s Zuckerberg divides opinion: cold, mannered, edging toward caricature in places, and chilling at his best. Bill Burr and Betty Gilpin add weight.

Sorkin often favours a lone figure facing a room of articulate people who are sure they’re right, and this story hands him a pure version of it. As I read it, the film argues that conscience is a solitary act and institutions are built to make it expensive. That’s a serious claim. It deserves testing. Sorkin’s method carries a danger: the characters, whichever side they stand on, tend to speak in Sorkin’s cadence, so a case can seem won by the better lines instead of the better evidence. Evidence carries the film, and research does not move on its own. The film meets that danger most directly when characters pause to explain the research to one another and, by extension, to us. Those passages run long and lean toward lecturing, so the dread the documents ought to carry arrives secondhand.

I came away more persuaded than not. The first film invites admiration for a machine being built; this one asks the viewer to sit with what the machine did. My largest complaint concerns the close, which is soft and makes little point about Facebook itself. I wanted it harder on the company, and I wanted it to look ahead, because the problems the film describes have not ended and the future they point to looks highly problematic. The film is good in the plain sense; it is enjoyable and worth seeing. Viewers who followed Haugen’s evidence before the US Senate in 2021 will find a film that treats the subject seriously.