ORWELL: 2+2=5

ORWELL: 2+2=5

When Truth Stops Being a Fact and Becomes a Fatigue

By Serge Leterrier

“Some stories do not simply warn us about power — they reveal what the mind becomes when it must survive the unbearable, and why, in that inner pressure, even the impossible can start to feel… necessary.” — Serge Leterrier (Horizon of mind – 2026)

Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 feels less like a conventional film and more like a documentary-essay — a lucid journey built from observation rather than plot. It approaches Orwell as a living warning. The subject is not limited to surveillance or dictatorships: it reaches something quieter, more unsettling, almost invisible — the way an era can damage our relationship to truth until clarity itself becomes difficult to hold.

Some works entertain. Others shift the inner balance of the viewer. They do not simply tell a story: they expose a mechanism. They reveal a hidden structure, a soft pressure in the air, a way of living that alters minds without announcing itself. Orwell: 2+2=5 belongs to those rare films. Peck does not make a film “about Orwell” in the traditional sense. He uses Orwell as a threshold, an entry point into a question that most people avoid because it is uncomfortable: what happens to truth in a world where it does not vanish… but becomes impossible to carry?

We often reduce Orwell to an automatic image: Big Brother, screens, surveillance, the State watching and the individual forced into silence. A political dystopia. A clean, identifiable oppression. But Orwell’s power — and what Peck activates here — goes further than control. The most subtle danger lies elsewhere: in the way the human mind changes in order to survive inside an unstable environment. A system wins completely when it does not only silence you, but makes truth too expensive to defend.

This is where the formula “2+2=5” takes on a deeper meaning. It is often quoted as the symbol of imposed falsehood, the triumph of absurdity over logic. A direct violence: truth crushed, the mind forced to bend. Yet that reading is almost comforting, because it simplifies. It suggests a visible executioner and an obvious victim. 2+2=5 can work differently. It can enter as a microscopic concession. A sentence you let pass because you no longer have the strength to fight. A fine crack in the wall of reality — one that makes no noise.

Modern falsehood no longer always needs brutality. It can become an atmosphere. A fatigue. A saturation.

In yesterday’s world, lies often took the shape of an official truth: one narrative, one version, imposed. In today’s world, distortion can be more sophisticated, almost softer: it arrives through excess. Through multiplication. Through endless overflow. A thousand versions, a thousand interpretations, a thousand outrages, a thousand contradictions. Everything at once. Everything competing. Everything dissolving. And the mind, faced with that noise, does not necessarily start believing what is false. It starts doubting everything. Then it lowers its intensity just to breathe.

And this is where manipulation becomes truly effective: it does not always need agreement. It only needs withdrawal.

The mechanism is simple. In a stable society, even when opinions clash, facts still serve as common ground. People may argue about meaning, but they share a floor. In a saturated society, that floor becomes fragile. A fact becomes an issue. An issue becomes a camp. A camp becomes an identity. And identity becomes a wall. Debate stops being exchange. It becomes reflex. A reflex that exhausts everyone.

British-writer-George-Orwel I Photo DR

Then something deeply human occurs: we stop looking for what is true, and we start looking for what is livable. What is bearable. What allows us to avoid permanent inner war. And this is where Orwell’s intelligence becomes frighteningly precise: modern surrender often does not begin with a grand lie. It begins with a private sentence: “I don’t have the strength anymore.” Then comes another: “I don’t know anymore.” And sometimes, a colder one: “I don’t care.”

Peck’s film works as a mirror because it does not only show an external system manipulating people. It also shows a consciousness growing tired. That tiredness is not a moral flaw, nor a shameful weakness. It is survival. When everything turns into debate — even what should remain obvious — the mind searches for a psychological solution: reduce the load, reduce the noise, reduce the conflict. And hidden inside that reduction, a major danger begins: truth loses its status as a foundation. It becomes one option among many.

Orwell had seen this coming. He understood that the ultimate dystopia is not only a regime or a police state. The ultimate dystopia is the collapse of the inner witness — that part of us that can say: “I know what I saw.” “I know what I lived.” “I know what is.” As long as that witness stays alive, a person remains upright, even when the world pushes them to fold. When the witness is damaged, the human being becomes adjustable. Malleable. They do not even need to be watched constantly anymore: they adapt themselves to instability.

At that point, “2+2=5” becomes more than a political lie. It becomes a crack in logic itself. An intimate distortion. The silent acceptance that stable results may no longer exist. That evidence has no solid ground. That reality has no floor. And once the mind accepts that, even slightly, everything becomes negotiable. What would once trigger immediate refusal becomes “discussable.” Even the real.

There is something chilling in that idea: modern distortion does not need to be believable, it only needs to be breathable. It settles in when it offers comfort — the comfort of avoiding the work of holding things clearly. Because holding truth today can become a discipline. A mental hygiene. A way of staying precise in fog.

This may be why the film hits so accurately. It treats Orwell less as a name and more as a structure. We think we are watching a dystopia, and we discover an architecture. A cold mechanism that speaks not only about States, but about the human being at the moment they bend reality in order to remain standing. That idea has followed me for a long time. It has quietly fed the writing of a personal film project — a psychological thriller in which the boundary between a scientific experiment and an inner world begins to crack, where consciousness becomes a place, and logic, for one moment, stops being a rule and turns into a necessity of survival. I will not say more. Some works are not meant to be explained: they are meant to be crossed. And sometimes, they force us to create.

Returning to Peck’s film after that brief, deliberate whisper, we understand something essential: the danger is not only that someone might say “2+2=5.” The deeper danger is losing the calm reflex of saying “2+2=4” with inner stability, with quiet certainty. Because what Peck reveals underneath the surface is a world where truth becomes heavy — a burden, a tension, a constant effort. A world where lucidity is no longer natural, but something we must constantly reclaim.

This is also why Orwell cannot be read with yesterday’s glasses. Contemporary manipulation does not always look like censorship. It often looks like maintained confusion, like steam. It looks like too much information and too little meaning. It looks like an era where everything is commented on, and almost nothing is truly distinguished. Where people feel intensely, but verify less. Where reaction is instant, and thought rarely lasts long enough to become judgment.

In such a world, falsehood does not need strength. It only needs presence — constant, repetitive, like background noise. And noise produces a specific effect: the mind becomes tolerant of the false. It does not celebrate it. It simply gets used to it. It takes it in like weather. A daily rain. And habit is the quietest form of capture.

The film asks a question that goes beyond politics, which is precisely why it matters: what remains of us when the mind no longer knows where to stand? When reality fractures into narratives, and every narrative demands our attention as if it were an emergency? A mind cannot live forever inside that tension. So it protects itself. It chooses the path of least resistance. It stops defending what is obvious. It stops keeping a straight line between what is and what it is willing to recognize.

This is where resistance takes a surprising form. Resistance is no longer only opposition to a regime or an external force. Resistance becomes the act of being exact again. Clear again. Holding words. Holding facts. Separating what we know from what we feel. Refusing vague sentences that soothe in the moment but dissolve reality over time. Refusing imprecision as comfort.

Because a world does not always collapse under bombs. It can collapse under imprecision.

In this reading, Orwell is not simply a writer of fear. He is a writer of reality — of the straight line that must remain stable for human beings to remain human. Peck reawakens that line without unnecessary preaching. He does not shout. He exposes. He shows that a society can drift into the false without spectacular lies. It drifts because the mind, little by little, chooses relief instead of truth. And that relief is not peace. It is anesthesia.

So this documentary-essay does not only ask: “Who lies?” It asks: “What happens inside us when we stop holding?” And once the question is asked, it stays. It lingers. It works like a slow pressure. Because it touches a zone everyone knows: that private minute when we would rather look away from an uncomfortable fact, simply to keep moving.

That may be the core of 2+2=5: truth does not disappear. It becomes heavy. And when truth becomes heavy, many minds search for lightness. For compromise. For fog.

In the end, the main enemy is not the screen that watches. The main enemy is the fatigue that settles in. A fatigue that leaves behind, inside the mind, a simple, soft, dangerous sentence: “Why not?”

Theatrical release on February 25, 2026 | 2h 00min | Documentary

For Diamont Média