The Great Hack (2019)

The Great Hack arrives with the sober purpose of a legal deposition and roughly the pacing of one as well. It concerns Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that harvested the Facebook profiles of millions and sold the resulting psychographic portraits to campaigns on two continents. The directors, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, assemble whistleblowers, journalists, and one very determined professor of media design, then let them explain, at length, how the machinery worked. The film has no interest in being subtle about its target. Big data is the villain, and the villain is very big indeed.

Much of the running time is given over to testimony. Experts walk us through data scraping, psychographic profiling, and the dark arts of microtargeting with the patience of people who have explained it many times before and expect to explain it again. The effect lands closer to an extended seminar than to cinema, though a well-produced seminar with a strong sense of grievance. The argument is that the accepted story of the 2016 election and the Brexit vote, the one about organic populist anger and a neutral social network, was a convenient fiction. The film proposes that a handful of well-funded firms quietly assembled the tools to nudge whole electorates, and that the nudging was for sale to anyone with a checkbook. The old narrative does not survive the encounter.

Brittany Kaiser, the former business development director who turns whistleblower, carries much of the emotional weight, a woman navigating rooms full of men who built the machine and now wish she would stop describing it. The cast is small and professional, chosen for what they know. There is no broader demographic project here, no side plot about identity, no detour into climate or the body or the brain. The film keeps its attention fixed on the ledger. It wants us angry about who owns our data and what they do with it, and it makes that case with a straight face and a great many slides.