It is disturbing and at times difficult to watch. No, I am not talking about the movie Cats. I am talking about Bombshell, which takes you into the world of Fox News, which was at the time essentially a rape factory. It involved both Fox News hosts and management going all the way to the top. I suspect it still is to some extent, although the spotlight on them toned down some of the worst abuses.

Blondes were especially targeted by Fox News President Roger Ailes, brilliantly portrayed by John Lithgow, and almost unrecognizable in his Roger fat suit. Roger Ailes is portrayed as horrible, because that is what he was. The only small comfort I had while watching this movie was repeatedly reminding myself that Ailes was dead. There were 23 known victims and probably countless others, since he has been accused of this pattern of behavior all the way back to the 1960s when he worked on the Mike Douglas talk show. He may have walked away from the Fox scandal an even richer man (instead of firing him for cause they paid him $40 million to leave), but he did not live long to enjoy it. He died just a year later.

Charlize Theron plays Megan Kelly as if she is channeling her, Nicole Kidman is Gretchen Carlson and Margot Robbie plays the fictitious Fox up and comer Kayla Pospisil. This is an amazing cast, and they disappear into their characters. There are so many actors that I really like in this and I did not recognize about half of them.

There are a couple of actors from The Good Place. Marc Evan Jackson plays Fox newscaster Chris Wallace, the son of legendary reporter Mike Wallace. If you work at Fox, you yourself are not a legendary reporter. It is where careers go to die. The indefatigable D’Arcy Carden appears as fictional Fox News employee Rebekah. Carden may be the hardest working woman in show business right now, doing four series where she was a regular character, three movies, and a bunch of tv one offs. That was this year alone.

Allison Janney plays civil rights attorney Susan Estrich. Civil rights attorney Lisa Bloom, whose mother is attorney Gloria Alrez, destroyed her reputation by representing Harvey Weinstein in an underhanded way. Susan Estrich’s reputation was similarly damaged by her representation of Ailes, using her understanding of victims to undermine them. Civil rights attorneys who represent victims should never turn around and represent the victimizers. No victim can ever trust them after that, nor should they. She is brilliant and remarkably accomplished, but what she did for Ailes was unforgivable, especially her attacks on the reporter who broke the story. I find it hard to believe that she did not know Ailes was guilty of repeated sexual harassment.

It has a huge cast of extremely talented actors, perhaps some of the best casting overall I have seen. When you have a cast of such familiar faces playing such familiar faces, it is easy to get caught up in trying to identify all the actors. Here I was just pulled into the story and found them all quite believable.

This movie is important, but it is not for everyone. Regular Fox viewers will find it uncomfortable, and those with a low tolerance for the abuse of women will also find it hard to watch. It was too much for my wife. There are moments where it plays like a horror film. You almost hear the menacing music every time Ailes appears on screen.

One of the important messages in the film is that these serial sexual harassers and rapists get away with it on their own. It takes a lot of enablers. Mirimax protected Harvey Weinstein, colleges protect rapists, the Catholic Church protected Catholic Priests who raped children. These people continue with their assaults for years because other people help facilitate it.

In this film, we see it is pretty much everyone at Fox who protect and enable Roger Ailes. One of the most sinister is his door keeper, played by an excellent but oddly uncredited Holland Taylor (the law professor from Legally Blonde). Here she portrays a woman who seems to be pimping for Ailes, and fully aware of what went on behind that closed door.

Usually in a film like this you have a hero who takes down the bad guys. While the bad guys do get taken down, no one in this film is a hero. They do what they do for their own selfish reasons. There is a great scene where Megan Kelly simply can not get that maybe her actions could help other women and why that might be important. Misogyny was built into the core of Fox News, and pretty much everyone just went along with it, even the women. It was, after all, less a place of journalism and more a propaganda outlet for the right wing beliefs of owner Rupert Murdock, excellently played by Malcom McDowell.

Jay Roach, who also directed the 2012 Game Change, tells an important story, but it is sadly incomplete. The film does not go into any detail about what was done to the women we know were harassed. The reason is simple. They are under non-disclosure agreements from Fox and can not talk about what happened to them. The fact that they are still being muzzled gives us a clue as to just how egregious the behavior at Fox was. To further reinforce the fact that there really are no heroes, these women took a settlement and a vow of silence instead of fully outing their victimizers. The film in a note at the end points out that the settlements to these women were dwarfed by the payouts to Ailes and O’Reilly, who walked away with millions and their victims silenced.

Bill Shine, who took over from Ailes, was forced out for the numerous sexual harassment accusations leveled against him, along with accusations of racist hiring practices. Unlike the others, he did not get a huge payout. He moved to the Trump Administration, generally a safe haven for serial sexual harassers and racists.