Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man may be the most chilling film of 2025, not simply because of the notoriety of Julian Assange, its subject, but also as a clinical exposé of the elaborate machinery of state power, media hostility and private opportunism.
Assange remains a spectral presence throughout, more talked about than seen. The director uses that space to explore a bigger story: the vast, interconnected system that made his destruction a priority. The results are as rigorous as they are alarming.
Inevitably, the film revisits the familiar contours of Assange’s rise: WikiLeaks’ early shots across the bow, from the “collateral murder” video to the vast diplomatic-cable leak that briefly placed him at the apex of global transparency activism.
Jarecki digs deep, excavating evidence and testimonies that suggest just how ruthlessly forces on both sides of the Atlantic sought to neutralise him.
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A key revelation concerns the Swedish rape allegations in 2010. The documentary presents anonymised interviews and contemporaneous text messages from the women involved, indicating that neither accused Assange of rape and that both were alarmed by the direction police were nudging their statements. What was long whispered emerges in documented form: this appears to have been a case shaped as much by political utility as by fact.
Even more harrowing is what happened after Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Jarecki tracks how UC Global, the Spanish security firm contracted to protect him, instead transformed his refuge into a surveillance trap.
A former employee, the documentary’s own Deep Throat, describes sex tapes, discussions of poisoning, and a pipeline of embassy footage uploaded to an American IP address housed in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas (an establishment coincidentally owned by the Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson).
Alarmingly, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, the US indictment’s star witness – a convicted paedophile and hacker – blithely admits on camera that he fabricated key claims about Assange instructing him to hack Iceland’s parliamentary systems. Pressed by Jarecki, he shrugs: he “can’t remember”.
If Jarecki’s portrait is unabashedly sympathetic, its implications are nonetheless bracing. Even if the 12 years he spent in confinement doesn’t bother you, the apparatuses used to pursue him will give you the heebie-jeebies.
In cinemas from Friday, December 19th
