Official Secrets  ★★★½

SOUTH African-born film-maker Gavin Hood isn’t shy why when it comes to tackling complex issues.

He’s only made a handful of films since debuting with Tsotsi in 2005, but they have all been praised for their unflinching presentation of of moral and political dillemma.

The 2015 drama Eye in the Sky was particularly effective, succeeding in building suspense out of boardroom debates  on the morality of drone warfare amid the countdown to a planned strike that will inevitably also kill innocent people.

Hood’s latest, Official Secrets, follows a similar theme but this time he has chosen real-life events upon which to base his drama.

It’s early 2003 and there is deep and widespread debate in all corners of the globe over the potential threat posed by a Saddam Hussein-led Iraq and whether he has so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Katharine Gun, as depicted in the film, was a hard-working and high-principled public servant who took immense pride in her work as a translator at the British Government Communications Headquarters.

Privately she was concerned by the British Government’s willingness to join the United States in taking direct action, deepened by her husband’s first-hand experience of the conflict tearing apart his former country.

As a professional, however, Katharine was able to separate her personal views from her work, until an email from her boss advised that part of her unit’s ongoing role would involve gathering evidence to help gain a resolution from the United Nations in support of an invasion of Iraq.

What made things even worse was that the directive followed a memo request by the United States’ National Security Agency that also expected specific countries to be targeted for surveillance and, presumably, using leverage to gain their positive votes.

Official Secrets recounts Gun’s decision to both leak the memo and then voluntarily admit to doing it, The Observer newspaper’s investigation and publication of the memo and the resulting tumultuous fall-out, particularly for Gun who lived for the next year under Government threat of prosecution and jail via the Official Secrets Act.

That’s a lot of exposition, but it’s handy to know the background because this is a film with much to cover and you need to keep up.

Adapting a book by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, Hood and his co-writers have done an excellent job of distilling a complex narrative and themes.

Their one failing perhaps is in making the story very polemic with little depiction of the Government argument.

Then again, that argument was either pretty clear at the time based on the Government’s actions or restricted in any detail to the film’s makers.

Keira Knightley is good as Gun. This is an actress who still struggles to make the right role choices but gets it absolutely right here.

Others in the cast include Ralph Fiennes as one of Gun’s defence lawyers, Matt Smith as Observer journalist Martin Bright and Rhys Ifans as  one of Bright’s ferociously anti-establishment colleagues Ed Vulliamy.

Overall the film needs a little more drama in its presentation and suffers from a general view that something had to be done to stop Hussein from mustering his people, thus impacting the opinion and relevance of Gun’s actions, as opposed to her principles.

But, as The Observer editor says at one point during debate over whether to publish: “Yes, editorially we support going to war, but this is a fucking good story.”

Official Secrets is released in cinemas on 21 November, 2019