Film

The Unknown Known

Name: The Unknown Known
Genre: Documentary, History
Released: 2013
Cast: Donald Rumsfeld, Kenn Medeiros, Errol Morris

Errol Morris turns his interrogation lamp on Donald Rumsfeld, letting the man talk himself in circles using his own memos as flint. It's less a rebuttal than a portrait of a mind built entirely from language and self-belief — genial, smiling, permanently certain of whatever he's saying as he says it. Riveting, infuriating, and never once cathartic.

TMDb rating

6.8

If you liked this

The Fog of War2003

Morris interviewed another Secretary of Defense a decade earlier, and Robert McNamara actually flinches — regret leaks through even as he defends himself. Watching them back to back is the real experience: same director, wildly different relationship to guilt.

But It's just as heavy, and if you wanted relief from Rumsfeld's evasions, McNamara's guilt-soaked hindsight isn't exactly lighter fare.

Standard Operating Procedure2008

Morris again, this time interviewing the soldiers who took the Abu Ghraib photographs rather than the men who set the policy. It's the view from the bottom of the chain Rumsfeld sat at the top of.

But Brutal and graphic, far more viscerally upsetting than anything in this film — there's no charm here to soften it.

No End in Sight2007

A clear-eyed, furious accounting of exactly how the Iraq occupation was mismanaged, built from insiders who actually wanted it to work. It fills in the practical disaster that Rumsfeld talks his way around.

But It's dense with names, acronyms and policy detail — more homework than mood piece, with no single charismatic antagonist to hang onto.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

In the Loop2009

Same drumbeat to the same war, but where Morris studies one man's straight-faced evasions, this film turns the entire apparatus of political language into outright comedy — the connective tissue is the weaponised non-answer, played for laughs instead of dread.

A profane, breathlessly quotable British satire about the exact same march to the Iraq war, told through the bureaucrats and spin doctors who actually make the sentences that start wars.

But It's a farce, wall-to-wall swearing and rapid-fire jokes — if you want more sober reckoning with the war, this will feel almost disrespectfully funny.

Taxi to the Dark Side2008

Alex Gibney traces the torture policy from a dead taxi driver in Afghanistan all the way up the chain of command. It's the darkest possible footnote to the language games Rumsfeld plays in his own film.

But Genuinely harrowing — this isn't a film you watch for entertainment, and it earns every bit of its discomfort.

Vice2018

Adam McKay's fourth-wall-breaking, tonally unhinged Dick Cheney biopic covers the same administration from the next office over, with none of Morris's restraint and all of the fury spelled out loud.

But The jokes and stylistic tricks can feel like showing off, and subtlety is not on the menu — a real change of pace from Morris's quiet dread.

The Act of Killing2012

Joshua Oppenheimer lets Indonesian death-squad leaders reenact their own killings, and the result is the closest thing in documentary to watching someone's conscience fail to arrive in real time.

But Far more disturbing and formally strange than anything here, and its central conceit will not sit well with everyone.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief2015

Another Gibney film built on interviews with people who spent decades inside a closed, self-justifying system — fascinating on what institutional language does to the people who speak it fluently.

But A different kind of institution entirely, and if you came for war and policy this is a sideways move into religion and control.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief poster

Restrepo2010

Embedded, ground-level, no interviews with anyone above the rank of captain — this is what the policy Rumsfeld describes from a comfortable chair actually looked like for the people executing it.

But There's no analysis, no politics spoken aloud, no Rumsfeld to argue with — just soldiers, which some will find frustratingly apolitical.

The War Room1993

A much sunnier documentary about political machinery — Clinton's 1992 campaign war room, all charm and strategy rather than consequence. A palate cleanser about the same appetite for spin, minus the body count.

But A genuinely different, lighter film, and after Rumsfeld this will feel almost frivolous by comparison.

Frost/Nixon2008

This is the fictional inverse of Morris's project: a dramatized interview built around the fantasy that a cornered man eventually cracks and admits the truth, when the whole unsettling point of The Unknown Known is that Rumsfeld never does.

Ron Howard's dramatization of the Frost-Nixon interviews turns the interview itself into a boxing match, complete with a scripted moment of confession that real interviews almost never get.

But It's a much tidier, more conventionally satisfying story than Rumsfeld ever gives Morris, and some will find that resolution too neat.