Friday One Sheet: THE REPORT Redacts Truth

Analog newsprint and redaction feature heavily into the key art for The Report. In noisy high-contrast black and white, Adam Driver in a pretty natty suit, is rendered in newsprint text with headlines poking out. "Fabricated Information" is underlined via a bit of wide redaction at his elbow.

The colour in the poster, an eye catching bright red, is the scribbled out word "Torture," which is in barely legible the title text, but is not actually a part of title of the film according to the Internet Movie Database (or the Sundance and Tiff catalogs). The film has been moving across its festival run before dropping in theaters November 13. (The other little bit of red in the poster.)

Director Scott Z. Burns has a knack for threading the line between calamity and comedy, and a way of manipulating audience expectations by never letting the heaviness of the story get in the way of a bit of slick entertainment or a sharp joke. In his screenplays for Steven Soderbergh, The Informant!, Contagion, Side Effects (and the also forthcoming The Laundromat), he packs a lot of exposition, character, and plot together using soft jabs of ironic distance and hard right hooks of emotional punch.

This poster certainly screams, 'SERIOUS MOVIE,' and is about the American post-9/11 detention and interrogation program which normalized torture (redacted) and other morally dubious techniques for intelligence gathering, but we will have to wait and see if the audience will be surprised.