Official Secrets

Official Secrets (2019) is Gavin Hood's true-story thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. One translator leaks a classified memo and ends up standing alone against two governments.

In the winter of 2003, weeks before the tanks rolled into Iraq, a British intelligence linguist opens an email forwarded from the NSA. It lays out a plan to lean on undecided members of the UN Security Council and pressure their votes toward war. Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) copies the page and hands it to a reporter. What follows is a front-page story, interrogations, a charge under the secrecy laws, and a quiet ultimatum: stay silent or lose your freedom, your husband and your right to remain in the country. Her lawyers scramble to defend an act the statute calls a crime.

Hood skips the car chases and builds tension out of people whose hands shake before they decide. Alongside Knightley are Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans. The script draws on court records and the reporting of the period, and Gun herself advised the production. A measured film about what one honest move can cost. Stream Official Secrets (2019) online on iFILM.