As someone who has worked both as a journalist and a PR practitioner in my time (the latter thankfully no more), I have definitely experienced the feeling of being the gamekeeper turned poacher and have witnessed the joys and the stresses on both sides of the divide. Done well, PR is a force to be reckoned with and most definitely a tool for good, but done badly it can have implications for both the spin-doctor and their target.

Stupendous PR fails, bad blog pitches, media missteps, bad judgment, poor PR pitching and PR faux pas are a joy for the average journo like me to rejoice smugly in, and if the amount of people who like to chime in with, “What were they thinking?” is anything to go by then I guess there’s something about PR train wrecks that appeal to us all. In the age of social media one thing’s for sure, you’d don’t want be a bad PR example because on the trusty Internet, it’s forever!

As someone who has worked both as a journalist and a PR practitioner in my time (the latter thankfully no more), I have definitely experienced the feeling of being the gamekeeper turned poacher and have witnessed the joys and the stresses on both sides of the divide. Done well, PR is a force to be reckoned with and most definitely a tool for good, but done badly it can have implications for both the spin-doctor and their target.

Stupendous PR fails, bad blog pitches, media missteps, bad judgment, poor PR pitching and PR faux pas are a joy for the average journo like me to rejoice smugly in, and if the amount of people who like to chime in with, “What were they thinking?” is anything to go by then I guess there’s something about PR train wrecks that appeal to us all. In the age of social media one thing’s for sure, you’d don’t want be a bad PR example because on the trusty Internet, it’s forever!

PR and the nature of spin is one of the key themes that jumped out at me when I watched Manipulation, showing this week on Rialto. Set in Zurich in 1956, it is centred around the Cold War at the height of its terror and focuses on the work of an influential PR consultant named Dr. Harry Wind (Sebastian Koch). The tale begins as a compromising photograph exposes a Swiss star reporter as a Soviet spy. Unable to withstand the pressure, he commits suicide in the interrogation room. Special agent Urs Rappold (Klaus Maria Brandauer) from the counter-espionage department is plagued by doubt: Were the photographs really genuine? And why did the influential PR advisor, Dr. Harry Wind, even have the photographs made and available? In a merciless cat and mouse game with Dr. Wind as a manipulative storyteller, Rappold realizes that he himself is playing a key role in a right royal conspiracy. When the seemingly unflappable Wind suggests the incriminating photographs might have been faked, Rappold starts to question the role he is unwittingly playing (or being played) in and the drama really amps up. Wind, who describes what he does for a crust vaguely as "trying stuff out", seems to be most definitely trying something on. Based on a novel by Walter Mattias Diggelman, the story is based on an actual scandal in which the Swiss secretly concocted a plan to acquire a stockpile of atomic weapons, which is another story all together but no less intriguing.

Concocted before the advent of digital deception, Manipulation raises intriguing questions about the reliability of images in an age before Photoshop and similar methods of - ahem - manipulation. Can you imagine the shitstorm (for want of a better word) that would have erupted had this fictional scenario taken in place in 2014, when the images would have been leaked online and well-dissected long before the reporter had even been aware of their existence?

As the story slowly comes into focus over a very economical 90 minutes, we are never quite sure who is deceiving whom. It reminds us that anyone and anything can be manipulated - especially the truth when there is no one out there freely coming forth with an alternative viewpoint.

Definitely one for the conspiracy theorists amongst us and those that love a hyper masculine, solid acting team, this cat-and-mouse thriller is definitely a winner.

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