The Fifth Estate

The story begins at a hacker conference in 2007. WikiLeaks, a little-known organization founded by Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), has gained a degree of notoriety within the hacking community for publishing information about the corrupt practices of Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi. One of the site’s admirers is Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl), a German tech wiz whom Assange immediately trusts, even confiding in him about his mother’s abusive boyfriend who was a member of the Aussie cult “The Family,” and used to abuse young Julian and force feed him psychiatric drugs. “Why do you think my hair’s white?” he says.

Before long, Domscheit-Berg is serving as Assange’s—and WikiLeaks’s—right-hand man. “You can change the world with a great idea, but you need people to put themselves on the line,” exclaims Assange. The duo, who do almost all the work themselves, enjoy a string of early successes, including the publication of documents alleging illegal activities at the Cayman Islands branch of the Swiss bank Julius Baer, the membership list of the far-right British National Party, and more. Oddly, WikiLeaks’s first major coup, the Kaupthing Bank documents leak—which preceded the Icelandic financial crisis—is glossed over. The site really starts to gain steam in April 2010, when it released gunsight footage showing civilians and two Reuters journalists being shot by an Apache helicopter in Baghdad in what Assange dubbed the “Collateral Murder” video. As WikiLeaks gains more traction, its snowy-haired, urbane leader becomes more and more shaken and withdrawn, and eventually things come to a head in the buildup to the release of the “Afghan War Diary,” a collection of over 76,900 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan, which was released in coordination with The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian. Assange wanted the documents to be published sans redactions, while Domscheit-Berg thought otherwise.