What if the people who built your phone's favourite apps came forward to warn you about them? That's the hook of Jeff Orlowski's The Social Dilemma, a documentary built around former engineers and executives from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with a scripted family drama woven through it. It premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and landed on Netflix that September, where it became one of the most talked-about films of the year. Critics were mostly on board, with Rotten Tomatoes counting about 85% of reviews as positive and Metacritic averaging 78.
What critics loved
The insiders were the main draw. Nell Minow at RogerEbert.com called the confessions from industry figures exceptional, and Elizabeth Pankova at The New Republic said the film's real power was its speakers, the remorseful Silicon Valley veterans turned conscientious objectors. Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris won particular praise, with David Ehrlich at IndieWire describing him as a measured voice of reason and giving the film a B+ for bringing new insight to a familiar subject.
Plenty of reviewers simply found it alarming in the way it intended. Devika Girish at the New York Times called it "remarkably effective in sounding the alarm" about data mining, and ABC News' Mark Kennedy called it an eye-opening look at how social media is designed to hook its users. Christopher Llewellyn Reed at Film Festival Today gave it three stars out of four, crediting it for pairing well-researched detail with entertaining dramatized scenes.
Where critics split
Those dramatized scenes, starring Skyler Gisondo as a teenager slowly swallowed by his feed and Vincent Kartheiser as the algorithm, were the biggest sticking point. Minow found some of them just silly, Ehrlich called them too on the nose, and Casey Newton at The Verge thought the ominous piano score running under every scene made the whole thing feel a little campy. The Guardian's John Naughton defended the approach, arguing the storyline helps explain the problem to distracted viewers.
Others questioned the argument itself. Pranav Malhotra at Slate said the film leans on tired, dystopian ideas of technology as the sole cause of harm, and faulted it for not crediting researchers such as Safiya Noble who raised these alarms first. Pankova noted that little of the information was new, Matt Cipolla at The Spool found it too narrow to offer real answers, and Llewellyn Reed felt its barrage of grim facts left viewers unsure what to actually do.
The consensus
The interviews are strong enough to give The Social Dilemma a solid QC score, but the clumsy drama and heavy-handed tone keep it from going higher. Fun sits in the middle: critics found it gripping and genuinely unsettling, though the scripted scenes were as likely to draw an eye-roll as a gasp. It works best as a conversation starter, and judging by the reviews, it started plenty of them.
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Social Dilemma, critical response (New York Times, ABC News, RogerEbert.com, The New Republic, The Guardian, Slate, The Verge, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic)
- IndieWire via Yahoo: The Social Dilemma review (IndieWire)
- Film Festival Today: The Social Dilemma illustrates a problem in need of a solution (Film Festival Today)
- The Spool: The Social Dilemma, Sundance 2020 (The Spool)
- Rotten Tomatoes: The Social Dilemma (critics' consensus)