Some of the most urgent films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival aren’t here to soothe. Together, Orwell: 2+2=5, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and Frankenstein play like sizzle reels of caution, and at their best, they’re award-worthy symbols of alarm. These films, the first two of which are documentaries, don’t just entertain—they confront fractured humanity, closeness and distance under Israel’s siege of Gaza, and a creation we’ve set loose, growing beyond our control. That’s the one muscle of film—to interrogate rather than facilitate. Orwell: 2+2=5 Director Raoul Peck, who gave us 2016’s I Am Not Your Negro, didn’t make Orwell: 2+2=5 to feel like a documentary in the usual sense—it’s a dare, the sort of blunt truth authoritarian regimes treat like contraband. The film portrays a slow-creep march around authoritarianism, not from an academic distance, but as an unsettling, visceral lesson in the here and now. Picture British actor Damian Lewis reading George Orwell’s final musings—his letters, essays, diaries—with an almost clinical cadence. These reflections are layered over raw, jarring images: Gaza in ruins, Donald Trump’s distorted truths, and the online mechanics of misinformation that enable our tendencies to ignore the unimaginable. “That’s unfortunately our capacity … to forget, our capacity to repress,” says Peck, who was born in Haiti, a country shaped by authoritarian rule. “Hitler wrote a book, Mein Kampf. He said exactly what he was going to do, and he did exactly what was written there. And yet the whole German society, the whole European society, did not believe him—they felt he was a joke.” “They thought, well, we will control him. They thought, well, our modern world cannot go that far down. We cannot imagine genocide going on. But it was written,” he continues. To that end, the film is less of an appeal to our sense of what we might already know than a critique of our numbness to it. Optically, it’s haunting. Words such as “doublespeak” (language designed to obscure or mislead), “newspeak” (a controlled vocabulary to limit thought), “thoughtcrime” (the criminalization of dissenting ideas), and “freedom is slavery” (the manipulation of truth to enforce obedience) populate the screen, overlaid on contemporary images of conflict, political spectacle, and media manipulation. Peck discovered Orwell through a kindred perspective. “Orwell grew up in the exterior of that world,” he says. “So his view and his analysis—I could find myself through that. I discovered Orwell as a brother, and that was an important connection because it was visceral. It was human.” For Peck, Orwell’s essays, particularly “Why I Write,” revealed a writer’s consciousness of his role in confronting injustice—a sensibility that informs every frame of Orwell: 2+2=5. Infographics lay bare uncomfortable truths: the widening gap between the rich and the rest, and the contrast between government promises and Gaza’s destruction. But it’s not just about relaying facts—social media and AI shape what we believe and forget. Peck frames Orwell in the digital age: “It’s basically Orwell’s world with the instruments to do it easier today. How can you manipulate? How can you gain power and control everything? Authoritarian terrorism means that you want to rewrite history. Now, with fake news, you rewrite history with a click. Just give a prompt and you’ve created a different path.” He stresses that Orwell’s analysis was grounded in real regimes, not prophecy: “You just apply it to your current situation, and redo the analysis.”