'Cover-Up' Review: An Interesting and Powerful Look Into the World of Journalism
- Romey Norton
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
By Romey Norton - January 5, 2026
Netflix’s Cover-Up arrives with the confidence of a film that knows its subject matter is powerful enough without cinematic grandstanding. Rather than chasing sensationalism, the documentary adopts a measured, investigative tone, mirroring the journalistic ethos it seeks to examine. What unfolds is not simply a portrait of a famous reporter or a catalogue of scandals uncovered, but a reflective study of truth, power, and the uneasy space between them.
At its core, Cover-Up interrogates the idea of exposure. Who gets to reveal the truth, at what cost, and how those truths are received once they emerge. The film traces decades of investigative reporting that challenged official narratives, often provoking hostility from institutions determined to preserve authority. Through the almost two hour runtime the film presents reporting as attritional labour: slow, obsessive, morally ambiguous, and frequently isolating.
The journalist at the heart of Cover-Up is shown as principled but prickly, relentless but likeable. Old notebooks, yellowing clippings, and fragmented archival footage form a tactile sense of history, reminding viewers that these revelations were not inevitable outcomes but fragile discoveries that could easily have been buried. Archival footage is woven into contemporary material, avoiding nostalgia while reinforcing the cyclical nature of political deception. Music is used sparingly, underscoring moments of reflection rather than dictating emotional response.
The language isn’t afraid to shock the audience with truth. Discussing how men in the Vietnam war would shoot babies, rape women and kill them after. The journalist is sombre in saying he learned so much he “couldn’t take it anymore”. We watch him as he continues to uncover the truth by taking phone calls, researching, all while telling us about his life. This allows the audience to build a rapport with him, and we can put ourselves in his shoes. Here, we want him to fight the good fight and expose how the army and government kept secrets and lied to the masses about their real actions and intentions.
Cover-Up does well in drawing subtle parallels between historical government secrecy and today’s information ecosystem, where truth competes with spin at unprecedented speed. And while the tools of journalism have evolved, the structures of denial remain remarkably consistent. Power still resists scrutiny; it has simply learned new ways to deflect it.
That said, the film is not without limitations. Some of the more controversial chapters of its subject’s later career are acknowledged but not rigorously dissected. This creates a slight imbalance, as the documentary occasionally seems more comfortable chronicling battles already validated by history than grappling with unresolved disputes. A deeper engagement with these tensions might have complicated the narrative in productive ways, challenging viewers to interrogate not just institutional power, but journalistic authority itself.
In its final sections, Cover-Up shifts toward the present tense, observing how the same instincts (scepticism, patience, distrust of official narratives) remain urgently relevant. The film suggests that the greatest threat to accountability is not censorship alone, but exhaustion: a public worn down by complexity, ambiguity, and the relentless churn of information.
In this sense, Cover-Up functions as both historical document and contemporary warning. It asks viewers to consider their relationship to truth. The documentary does not demand admiration for its subject, but it does demand attention, and, perhaps, a renewed respect for the slow, difficult work of asking inconvenient questions.
Measured, rigorous, and quietly unsettling, Cover-Up stands as one of Netflix’s more intellectually demanding documentaries. It may not offer catharsis or easy conclusions, but it leaves behind something more valuable: a lingering unease about how much remains hidden, and how fragile the mechanisms of exposure truly are.
'Cover-Up' is available to watch on Netflix UK.
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