Suffice to say, I went into this film fiercely determined not to like it, feeling wonderfully indignant before the curtain had even been drawn. While I was not proved entirely wrong, I happily conceded that the director and screenwriter were equally aware of the potential limits of their film. Far from giving Hollywood a vainglorious pat on the back, they have produced a clever, nuanced, enthralling, unostentatious drama that pans out from predator Harvey Weinstein to focus on the institutions that protected him, and on what it took for survivors and scribes to call him to account.

Harvey Weinstein – one of the most powerful men in Hollywood – was publicly exposed as a serial sexual abuser when reporters Megan Twohey (played by Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) turned an industry open secret into a Pulitzer Prize-winning article published on 5 October 2017. The actor Alyssa Milano tweeted a response to their story a few days later in which she suggested that all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘“Me too” as a status’. In the following twenty-four hours, around 500,000 tweets and twelve million Facebook posts featuring the hashtag were shared. She Said – the film adaptation of a book of the same title – recounts in systematic, almost punctilious fashion, the investigation by Twohey and Kantor that sparked this movement; a story that began with the survivors and widened out to the webs of enablers – lawyers, accountants, and management – that protected Weinstein at Miramax.

Cast of She Said, directed by Maria Schrader

With little action beyond journalists tapping away in noisy New York Times offices, mysterious late-night phone calls, editors crowded around a computer, or Kantor and Twohey knocking on doors, interviewing survivors, or wearily making their way home to long-suffering families (a happy reversal of the usual stereotype), She Said is in some ways a typical journalism thriller à la Spotlight or All the President’s Men. What makes it different is its delicate treatment of survivor testimony.

It is not the journalists’ story that stays with you, but those of the survivors – their assaults chillingly recounted through voice-overs while a camera pans spectre-like from clothes strewn on a hotel floor to an unmade bed, a spa, or the maroon and gold-patterned wallpaper in a hotel corridor. Some stories are familiar, particularly those of Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd (playing herself), and Gwyneth Paltrow. It is the testimony of Miramax employees, production assistants, and eighteen-year-old model Ambra Gutierrez that is most affecting. We hear about the guerrilla tactics used to evade a predator – wearing ‘two pairs of stockings to buy more time’, dressing in puffer jackets, ensuring that the chair you sit in was far from him. And we hear Weinstein’s thick voice cajoling, demanding, bullying. In the recording from a police operation, Gutierrez tells Weinstein that she feels uncomfortable and wants to leave. Just come into the room ‘even for five minutes’ he implores as the camera pads down a dimly lit, carpeted hotel corridor. ‘Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.’

The fact that Harvey Weinstein has been convicted and sent to prison (albeit subject to appeal) may have liberated the directors from the narrative constraints we have come to expect from books and films about sexual violence – one where the endpoint is court then jail. It also meant that they could diminish the looming figure of Weinstein himself to one of many formless shapes in the institutional abysm of sexual abuse, alongside the system of settlements and non-disclosure agreements that silence women, the courts and police that don’t believe them, the trolls that victimise them if they speak out, the men who feel entitled to women’s bodies or simply their attention at a bar, and the popular narratives that discredit their truth or authority: ‘Are you sure this is not just about young women who sleep with a director in order to get ahead?’ one man asks.

Maria Schrader has done filmic justice to the experiences of the women abused by Weinstein, although I remain sceptical about what a film like this suggests about the #MeToo movement. On the one hand, we might listen to the rumblings of a backlash, witness the treatment of Brittany Higgins or Amber Heard, and applaud She Said as a reminder of work to be done. On the other hand, the reason why a journalism thriller would be the ideal genre for #MeToo is because a movement that believes in the politically transformative power of speech accords journalists a heroic role. The final scene of the film, where a cursor hovers over ‘publish’, is a symbol of the imaginative limits of the movement as a whole: telling stories as political action and, too often, the end of political action.