The Laundromat: A Comedy. Sort Of. Not Really.
- Ben Sorensen
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
There's a particular kind of darkness that only comedy can access. Not the jump-scare darkness, not the grinding bleakness of an arthouse drama about suffering. The darkness that arrives wearing a good suit, cracking a joke, and then quietly hands you a document that proves the whole system is rigged — and has been for decades.
The Laundromat is that film.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh and released on Netflix in 2019, the film uses the Panama Papers scandal — one of the largest data leaks in history — as its raw material, and then does something unusual with it. Instead of treating it like a thriller or a courtroom drama or a prestige exposé, Soderbergh constructs something closer to a dark satirical lecture, hosted by the two most charming fraudsters you'll ever have the misfortune of trusting.
Gary Oldman as Jürgen Mossack, and Antonio Banderas as Ramón Fonseca, the actual founding partners of the actual law firm at the centre of the actual scandal serve as our guides. They break the fourth wall constantly. They explain the mechanics of shell companies, offshore accounts, and reinsurance loops with the cheerful confidence of men who genuinely believe they are providing a useful
service to society. They are funny. They are charming. And the material they're cheerfully explaining destroyed real lives.
That's the engine of the whole thing.
The film moves through a series of interlocking vignettes — ordinary people caught in the invisible machinery of offshore finance. A grieving widow (Meryl Streep, doing what Meryl Streep does) trying to get compensation after a boating tragedy, only to discover the insurance policy behind the policy behind the policy doesn't technically exist in any jurisdiction that cares. An African billionaire using shell companies to silence inconvenient truths. A story reaching into Chinese political corruption that is, genuinely, the darkest corner of the film.
None of these people are the point, exactly. They're demonstrations. Case studies in a lecture about how the global financial system allows wealth to become frictionless and invisible while accountability becomes somebody else's problem in some other country with a friendlier tax regime.
The film was so uncomfortable for the people it depicted that the actual Mossack and Fonseca sued Netflix two days before its scheduled release to have it blocked. A judge denied the injunction. Netflix called the lawsuit "laughable." The film went live as planned.
That, in a way, is the review.
The comedy is the wrapper. The Panama Papers are the contents. The fact that it's all true is what makes it genuinely, quietly terrifying.
Mainstream critics were divided — some found the anthology structure too episodic, too arch, too eager to lecture. They're not entirely wrong. This is a film that knows exactly what it thinks and isn't especially interested in pretending otherwise. If you want moral ambiguity and a slow unfolding mystery, this isn't quite that. It's more like a very stylish, extremely well-cast TED Talk that occasionally pauses to remind you that the man giving the talk helped rich people hide money from the rest of us.
And for the right viewer, that is absolutely a recommendation.
The all-star cast is deployed in service of the subject matter rather than in spite of it. Sharon Stone, Jeffrey Wright, David Schwimmer — they're not here to do prestige acting. They're here to populate a world that keeps revealing, layer by layer, that you can follow the money, but the money doesn't want to be followed, and it has very good lawyers.
The film ends, as the best satires do, by looking directly at you.
This is a film that does something genuinely rare: it takes a subject most people found either too abstract or too overwhelming, the Panama Papers affected heads of state, oligarchs, celebrities, and entire national economies, and makes it viscerally, personally legible. You don't need to understand financial law. You just need to follow one ordinary person trying to be compensated for a genuine tragedy, and then watch as the maze they're navigating simply... has no exit.
Must watch. Full stop. Then go look up the Panama Papers.
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