Risk steps inside Julian Assange’s embassy room, but leaves more confused than it started

Julian Assange, dressed in a grubby T-shirt and holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, is being asked what his favourite food is. “I am not a normal person,” he blurts back at his interviewer who, weirdly enough, happens to be the pop star Lady Gaga. “I am not a normal person,” he says again, apropos of nothing, his sallow face lighting up with one of his trademark knowing smirks.

This is one of the many surreal scenes that overstuff Laura Poitras’ Risk, an equally infuriating and enthralling documentary that took the US filmmaker seven years to complete. But for all its oddness, the moment also happens to be a rare, unfettered glimpse at Assange’s character. Preening himself for the camera in Gaga’s hands, Assange does not seem like a traitor, or an arch raconteur, or the mastermind his fans and detractors alike believe him to be. Instead, Assange comes across as a spoiled, slightly irritating brat.

If only the rest of the film was so consistent. Risk doesn’t ever really seem to know what it wants to be, or what it has to say about Assange. “At first I tried to ignore the contradictions in the story,” Poitras says in one memorable voiceover. “But then I realised the contradictions were the story.” Which, sure, is probably true, but it doesn’t exactly make for satisfying viewing.

Nor does it help that Poitras’ documentary has no central thrust. For its first third, the film is an illuminating, fascinating examination of Wikileaks’ internal power struggles. Then it becomes a portrait of a slightly repellent man under investigation for sexual assault (in one particularly uncomfortable moment, Assange blames “radical feminists” for the allegations against him).

Then, finally, it tangles itself up in the tale of the Russian hacking of the 2016 election and Assange’s potential role in it, as Poitras makes the risky decision to end her film with a still unfolding, still unresolved story.

None of which makes the film anything less than intensely, immensely watchable, albeit in a “can’t tear your eyes off a car crash” kind of way. At its best, Risk is a gleefully erratic, unsettling look at a conflicted man – although one should be prepared to walk out of the film knowing less than one did going in.

Perhaps it’s pertinent that the image you’re left with when it’s all over is Assange preparing to flee to the Ecuadorian embassy wearing a disguise, his hair dyed, popping in contacts to alter his eye colour, an unknown man obscuring his own personhood.

Risk was reviewed as part of Sydney Film Festival 2017.

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