The Truman Show (1998)

Every now and then a film gets into your head in a way that lingers long after the credits roll. The Truman Show is one of those films. I genuinely catch myself sometimes, in a quiet moment, wondering whether the people around me are a bit too perfectly placed. Whether the clouds are moving just a little too conveniently. It sounds daft when you say it out loud, but that's the power of this film. It plants a seed of paranoia and waters it for two hours.

What makes it work so brilliantly is the strange dramatic irony at its heart. We, the audience, are told everything from the off. There's no mystery about the setup. Truman Burbank's entire life, from birth, has been a live television programme broadcast to the world, and every single person in his existence is an actor. His wife, his best mate, his neighbours, all of them in on it. And yet, knowing all of that, there's still a gut-punch moment when Truman starts to figure it out for himself. You'd think the dramatic tension would collapse the second you remove the surprise, but it doesn't. That's a sign of genuinely clever filmmaking.

A lot of that tension rests squarely on Jim Carrey's shoulders, and here's the thing I'll keep saying until people actually listen: the man is a seriously good actor. I know, I know, for a lot of people he's the bloke pulling faces in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective or stretching his head through letterboxes in The Mask, and look, those films are brilliant fun, but they've done him a disservice in terms of how he's perceived as a performer. In The Truman Show, the rubber-faced energy is dialled right back. What he gives you instead is someone who is warm and funny and ordinary, and then, as the cracks start to appear in Truman's world, quietly, devastatingly lost. The moment where it all clicks for him, where you watch realisation move across his face, that's proper acting. No mugging, no spectacle. Just a man processing the fact that his entire life has been a lie.

The film also deserves credit for how it presents the world watching Truman on their screens. We cut to viewers in bars, in baths, huddled around televisions, genuinely invested in this one man's life. It's a pretty sharp piece of commentary on reality television and voyeurism, and it hasn't aged badly at all. If anything, in a world where people broadcast their entire lives online, it feels more relevant than it did when it came out. The idea of an audience rooting for someone's suffering, or at least their entertainment, without ever stopping to consider the ethics of it, sits uncomfortably in all the right ways.

I do think the film is slightly more comfortable in its first half than its second. Once Truman begins actively resisting and the people running the show have to respond, it tips a little into territory that feels less precise, less unsettling. But it rights itself for the ending, which is exactly as good as it needs to be. Simple, earned, and quietly moving.

Four stars. If you haven't seen it, sort that out. And if you have seen it, you probably already know exactly what I mean about looking up at the sky sometimes and feeling just a little bit watched.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 1998  | Watched: 2025-04-06

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Peter Weir: Dead Poets Society (1989)
More with Jim Carrey: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) · Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) · Yes Man (2008) · The Mask (1994)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)