‘How to Build a Truth Engine’ Review: A Sobering but Fatally Flawed Doc on Disinformation
variety.comSiddhant Adlakha A carefully constructed and often sobering documentary about disinformation, “How to Build a Truth Engine” makes meticulous efforts to lay out its visual and thematic groundwork.
However, its chilling portrait of the digital world comes up against a unique roadblock. A fleeting scene late in the film not only plays like a last-minute addition (concerning recent real-world events), but calls the movie’s own perspective into question.
That the film is so effective at building its arguments is both testament and fatal flaw. When its narrative gives in to the same impulses it critiques, the audience has, ironically, been trained to recognize this failing.
Director Friedrich Moser builds a sense of allure as he introduces his ensemble of subjects, from neuroscientists to investigative journalists, whose fields of study seem completely disparate from one another at first.
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