Everyone walked into The Social Reckoning looking for Mark Zuckerberg. The early coverage has been a referendum on Jeremy Strong against Jesse Eisenberg, and on whether Aaron Sorkin can direct his own pages without David Fincher behind him. Those are fair questions, and the answers are mostly in. They are also beside the point, because the film’s conscience does not sit in the chief executive’s office.

It sits with the engineer who carried the company’s own research out the door. Mikey Madison, the Anora star, plays Frances Haugen, and she is the one place where the reviews stop agreeing with each other. They do not simply grade her performance. They read the same choice, a quiet whistleblower who still believes in the place she is exposing, in opposite directions.

A whistleblower who still believes

The detail that keeps surfacing in the reviews is motive. SlashFilm’s Chris Evangelista describes a Haugen who believes Facebook can be a force for good in the world even as she watches what it does to people. Manuel São Bento, in a first reaction collected by Yahoo, calls Madison “excellent as a whistleblower driven by love, not spite.” Riot’s Julian Lytle, who otherwise gives the film a D, says she plays the data scientist as “a person struggling with the reality of where she works versus the ideal of what that place says it’s going for.”

That is a deliberate design, and it explains a great deal about the temperature of the whole film. The Social Network, as most of us remember it, ran on appetite: a founder who wanted in, and then wanted everything. Sorkin’s companion piece swaps appetite for disappointment. Its moral compass is not a rival with a grudge but an insider who took the company at its word and found the gap. Disappointment is a quieter engine than ambition, and the critics who find the film flat, or, in World of Reel’s word, “mid,” are in part describing what that engine sounds like.

Where the critics split on Mikey Madison

For one camp, the quiet is the point. Joey Magidson at Awards Radar writes that Madison plays Frances “very quiet, mostly coming alive when bantering with White’s Jeff,” and that she is “the emotional core of the film.” Tom Chatalbash of FilmSpeak finds Madison and Jeremy Allen White “quietly magnetic.” 25YL says Madison “is at her best when Haugen speaks in her own words,” and that she and White “carry the movie.” World of Reel’s summary of the early reactions lands in the same place: Madison and White carry it.

For the other camp, the quiet is a vacancy. Evangelista calls her “completely miscast,” “so damn good in ‘Anora’” but “struggling with the pages and pages of information her character has to deliver,” and he finds no chemistry between the two leads at all. Set that against Magidson, who credits the duo with lifting the film, and the split is complete: what one critic hears as the film’s heartbeat, another finds inert.

Even the harshest verdict on the film itself spares her. Lytle’s D comes with the line that Madison is “the best part of the film.” The common complaint lands on the man behind the camera instead.

The shadow of The Social Network, and a better ancestor

On Sorkin the director, the reviews converge. Magidson says it is the first time he felt Sorkin would have been better served as only the screenwriter. 25YL calls the direction “the weak link” and says too much of the film resembles prestige television. Paul Klein, quoted by Yahoo, calls it “a shrug of a film” that misses the Fincher magic, and Jonathan Sim, in TheWrap’s round-up, files it as “a decent journalism drama that lives in the shadow of its much superior predecessor.”

The energy, by most accounts, belongs to the antagonist. Chatalbash calls Strong “a ferocious force as Zuckerberg,” Magidson finds his work “rather chilling,” and Evangelista, who liked almost nothing, concedes that Strong’s scenes are the only ones with any charge. 25YL wishes Sorkin had given him twice the scenes. That is the bind in miniature: the film rations the character with the voltage and builds itself around the one who withholds it.

The comparison with 2010 may be the wrong one. The closer ancestor is Michael Mann‘s The Insider, which paired a tobacco-industry whistleblower, Russell Crowe‘s Jeffrey Wigand, with a journalist, Al Pacino’s Lowell Bergman, and found its drama in the cost of telling the truth rather than in the villain’s lair. The Social Reckoning makes the same pairing, with White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. Judged against that lineage, a quiet Haugen is not a miscalculation in itself. It is a bet that the audience will lean in toward a heroine played this softly.

The real Frances Haugen and the release

The real Haugen, a former Facebook engineer, shared tens of thousands of internal company documents with regulators and journalists in 2021, including The Wall Street Journal, showing the company knew of harms tied to misinformation and mental health. The disclosures, which became the newspaper’s Facebook Files investigation, led to congressional testimony and wider scrutiny of social media platforms worldwide. She later told her own story in the 2023 memoir The Power of One.

Sorkin wrote and directed the film, which runs 112 minutes and also stars Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen and Bill Burr. It premiered on September 29 at the Curzon Mayfair in London, and Sony Pictures releases it in US theaters on October 9. World of Reel reports opening-weekend tracking of $4 million to $6 million.

Sorkin cast the Anora star as the conscience and gave the voltage to the villain. If those modest projections hold, the verdict on The Social Reckoning will not come from Zuckerberg’s scenes. It will come from whether audiences go along with a whistleblower written to stay quiet.

Tags: thrillers, Aaron Sorkin, The Social Reckoning, Mikey Madison, Frances Haugen