V for VendettaSave

The film opens with parallel introductions to its two leads. Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), a young production assistant at a state-controlled British television network, is sneaking out past the after-curfew streets of London. The United Kingdom of the near-future has become a totalitarian theocratic surveillance state under the rule of High Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt), who came to power years earlier following a domestic biological-weapons crisis. Curfew enforcement is brutal. Evey is intercepted by a small Fingermen patrol in a back alley, who attempt to assault her. A masked figure intervenes. The masked man, known only as V (Hugo Weaving), wears a stylized Guy Fawkes mask, a dark cloak, and twin daggers. He dispatches the Fingermen with theatrical efficiency, then escorts Evey to a London rooftop where the Old Bailey courthouse is rigged with explosives.

V's first public act is the destruction of the Old Bailey at midnight on the fifth of November, accompanied by his hijacking of the city's emergency broadcast system to proclaim a year-long campaign against the Sutler government. The broadcast announces that he will return to detonate the Houses of Parliament on the same date one year hence, and invites the British people to join him. Evey, having accidentally witnessed the Old Bailey demolition, is taken into V's underground lair (an extensive Shadow Gallery filled with confiscated cultural artifacts the regime has banned: paintings, books, records, films) for her own protection. Their relationship will form the film's emotional core.

V's identity and origin are revealed gradually through the investigation conducted by Inspector Eric Finch (Stephen Rea), the lead detective tasked by the Sutler government with capturing the terrorist. Finch's investigation uncovers a horrifying secret: years before Sutler's rise to power, a covert biological-weapons research facility called Larkhill operated under the auspices of a then-rising Conservative party member. Larkhill conducted lethal medical experiments on prisoners labeled enemies of the state — primarily political dissidents, religious minorities, and homosexuals. The experiments produced a viral agent that escaped and killed approximately one hundred thousand British civilians during what became known as the St. Mary's Crisis. Sutler used the panic to seize emergency powers and consolidate his rule.

V was a Larkhill survivor — patient five, in the experimental ward known as Subject V's Roman-numeral block. The experiments altered his biology in ways the film implies but does not fully explain: superhuman reflexes, accelerated healing, partial chemical-resistance. He escaped Larkhill during a fire he himself triggered, killed every researcher and guard who had abused him, and has spent the intervening years quietly assassinating each of the surviving Larkhill operatives in chronological order. His targets include Lewis Prothero, the regime's primary television demagogue (whom V kills in a methodical sequence early in the film); Anthony Lilliman, the Bishop of Westminster who participated in the medical experimentation; and Delia Surridge, the Larkhill medical doctor who wrote the experimental protocols and now lives quietly with her conscience-poisoned medical practice.

Evey, after being swept up in one of V's earlier operations, escapes the Shadow Gallery and seeks refuge with her former employer Gordon Deitrich (Stephen Fry), a popular comedian whose private home contains an extensive collection of contraband: a Quran, gay erotica, and political-satire material. Gordon is arrested and executed by the regime after broadcasting a comedy special openly mocking Chancellor Sutler. Evey, captured immediately afterward, is imprisoned in a Larkhill-style cell where she is interrogated, head-shaved, and threatened with execution unless she confesses V's hideout location. Through cell-wall scratches she discovers a journal left by a previous prisoner, an actress named Valerie, whose love letter to a future cellmate becomes the film's most-quoted text.

Valerie's letter recounts her life as a young actress whose homosexuality led to her Larkhill imprisonment and eventual death. The letter, hidden by Valerie before her death, gives Evey the courage to refuse her final confession demand. She is told she will be executed; she chooses death over surrender. The cell door opens. Evey discovers, to her horror and confusion, that the entire interrogation has been staged. She is in V's Shadow Gallery. V himself has imprisoned her, written Valerie's letter, and broken her psychological defenses to free her from the fear that controlled her life. The sequence is the film's most-discussed creative choice: a hero subjects his ally to extended psychological torture for her own moral liberation.

Evey, after a period of reckoning, accepts V's vision and his methods. The remaining months toward the November fifth deadline pass in a montage of public unrest, Sutler-government brutality, and increasing British civilian willingness to put on the Guy Fawkes masks V has been distributing through stolen mail networks. Inspector Finch, having uncovered the Larkhill connection, increasingly questions his loyalty to the regime. The film's third act intercuts V's confrontation with Creedy, head of the Sutler regime's secret police, with Finch's confrontation with Sutler himself. V kills Creedy in single combat after sustaining lethal gunshot wounds. He returns to the Shadow Gallery and dies in Evey's arms.

Evey carries V's body to the train tunnel where his pre-rigged demolition charge is waiting. She loads the train with V's remains, sets the destination for the Houses of Parliament directly above, and dispatches the train to its destination. Tens of thousands of British civilians, all wearing Guy Fawkes masks, gather in the streets surrounding the parliamentary complex despite the regime's curfew enforcement and military presence. The soldiers, ordered to fire on the crowd, refuse. The train explodes. The Houses of Parliament are destroyed in a coordinated demolition. The film's closing image is the masked crowd removing their masks to reveal not just Evey but a wide range of characters from earlier scenes, including Gordon Deitrich, Valerie, Inspector Finch, and Evey's own dead parents (in implied symbolic-imagination form).

V for Vendetta grossed $134 million globally on a $54 million budget, a strong commercial performance that nonetheless became overshadowed by its enormous cultural footprint. The film's Guy Fawkes mask, designed by David Lloyd for the original 1980s graphic novel, became the symbol of the Anonymous hacktivist movement and was prominently featured at Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring protests, and numerous other anti-authoritarian demonstrations across the 2010s. Hugo Weaving's masked performance, conveying genuine emotion entirely through voice and physicality without facial expression, was widely praised. Natalie Portman's commitment to the role, including her famous on-set head-shaving for the Larkhill cell sequence, was singled out by critics. Original graphic novel author Alan Moore disowned the film and removed his name from the credits, as he has with most adaptations of his work; co-creator David Lloyd, however, supported the picture publicly. The film remains one of the most politically influential comic-book adaptations ever made.

Director James McTeigue, a longtime Wachowski-collaborator who had been first assistant director on the Matrix trilogy, brought the Wachowskis' production design language to the project; sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski wrote the screenplay and produced. The film's London-as-totalitarian-future visual style drew heavily from Orwell's 1984 (specifically the 1984 film adaptation) and from contemporary post-9/11 surveillance-state imagery that audiences immediately recognized. The Sutler regime's reliance on race-baiting demagoguery, manufactured terror narratives, and persecution of minorities was widely read as commentary on post-2001 Anglo-American politics. The film's enduring relevance has only grown across the two decades since its release, as the underlying themes of state surveillance, dissent suppression, and population manipulation through fear have continued to dominate global political discourse.