The traditional premise of the Cambridge Film Festival’s ‘surprise screening’ is such that you buy a ticket without any information about the title, director or content, leaving it all to chance. It may sound somewhat risky, but with past showings including Pixar’s Up, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Looper, I felt assured that I would not be disappointed: and indeed I wasn’t. This year, I had the pleasure of previewing Oliver Stone’s Snowden, which will appear in UK cinemas this December. It is a thrilling biopic following the events preceding and following Edward Snowden’s decision to leak classified NSA files to the public in 2013, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the leading role. Gordon-Levitt does a fantastic job in character study, playing Snowden’s mannerisms so accurately that when the man himself makes a cameo at the end of the film one can scarcely notice a difference. He is certainly the stand-out performer of the film, as he skilfully documents Snowden’s cumulative guilt, horror, and anxieties about the very operations he works on, all while needing to keep face under the pervasive watch of boss Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans).

The film is unnerving in many ways; it shatters any pre-conceived notions of surveillance as people who spend their days producing illuminati YouTube videos and wearing tin foil hats. The tendrils of surveillance here reach into every corner of life, no matter how ‘insignificant’ one might seem. This is an uncomfortable reality touched upon many times in the film, where Snowden finds himself tapping the calls of dentists, doctors, and teachers merely by proxy of whom they know, able to bypass any ‘privacy’ settings along the way. It is these moments of uncomfortable clarity, of placing before our eyes the facts that we already know but so often sweep under the rug, which stuck chillingly in my mind beyond the final credits.

One of the few problems with the film, however, was where it tended to fall into hackneyed Hollywood clichés, perhaps inevitable in the dramatisation of a story that demands so much technical understanding and computer operation. Shailene Woodley gave a strong performance as Snowden’s long-suffering girlfriend Lindsay Mills, but at times their relationship fell into a predictable pattern of angsty man vs needy girlfriend.  Similarly, Ben Schnetzer as long-haired, laid-back, joke-cracking tecchie Gabriel Sol felt a little like a comic-book trope, and Nicolas Cage as mysterious instructor Hank Forrester drew more than a few laughs. In spite of this, the film kept a tense and exciting pace, cutting between scenes of ‘present’ Snowden, waiting for The Guardian’s press release to hit the headlines, and ‘past’ Snowden, the story he tells the camera during his wait, with tensions apparent on both sides.

If Snowden’s real-life leaks were not enough of a call to action, this film certainly provides a second push. It is a well-executed tale of sacrifice in the name of the right to know, and the right to call our governments out on their surveillance practices. When the non-fictional Snowden speaks at the end of the film, fearing ‘a new leader, under whom things might only get worse’, he speaks of an imminent reality in the coming US elections. The film has perhaps been released strategically, and is, at this time, essential viewing.