While his co-worker and neighbour, Parsons, seems content to follow the state's laws, Winston, haunted by painful childhood memories and restless carnal desires, keeps a secret diary of his private thoughts, thus creating evidence of his thoughtcrime.

His life greatly changes when he is accosted by fellow Outer Party worker Julia, a mysterious, bold-looking, sensual, and free-spirited young woman who works as a print machine mechanic in the Ministry of Truth, and they begin an illicit affair.

Julia procures contraband food and clothing on the black market, and for a brief few months they secretly meet and enjoy an idyllic life of relative freedom and contentment together.

It is later revealed that a telescreen hidden behind a picture on the wall in their room recorded their transgressions and that the elderly proprietor of the pawn shop, Mr. Charrington, is a covert agent of the Thought Police.

O'Brien instructs Winston about the state's true purpose and schools him in a kind of catechism on the principles of doublethink – the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts in the mind simultaneously.

For his final rehabilitation, Winston is brought to Room 101, where O'Brien tells him he will be subjected to the "worst thing in the world", designed specifically around Smith's personal phobias.

When confronted with this unbearable horror – a cage filled with wild rats – Winston's psychological resistance finally and irretrievably breaks down; he hysterically repudiates his allegiance to Julia.

Winston returns to the Chestnut Tree Café, where he had seen the rehabilitated thoughtcriminals Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford (themselves once prominent but later disgraced members of the Inner Party) who have since been "vaporized" and rendered unpersons.

Upon hearing a news report declaring the Oceanian army's utter rout of Eurasia's forces in North Africa, Winston, appearing to have been deprived of his freedom to think and feel for himself and reduced to a mere shell of a man, soon to be deprived of his physical existence, looks at the still image of Big Brother that appears on the telescreen but then quickly turns away from it and looks in the direction of Julia with tears in his eyes as the words "I love you" are heard whispered in his voice.

[8] Richard Burton, who was living in Haiti, joined the production six weeks into its shooting schedule[8] and insisted on his costume of a boiler suit being hand-made for him in Savile Row.

[citation needed] The disused Battersea Power Station in Wandsworth served as the façade for the Victory Mansions, and the Beckton Gas Works in the Docklands of Newham was used as the setting for the proletarian zones.

This technique was invented by Japanese cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa for Kon Ichikawa's film Her Brother (1960), in imitation of a more complicated process developed by Technicolor and Deluxe for the 1956 version of Moby Dick.

[19] It was released in the United States for one week in December 1984 at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles to qualify for the 1985 Academy Awards and grossed a house record $62,121, despite stormy weather.

[2] Roger Ebert awarded the film 3.5/4 stars, writing that it "penetrates much more deeply into the novel's heart of darkness" than previous adaptations, and describing Hurt as "the perfect Winston Smith".

The site's critical consensus states: 1984 doesn't fully emerge from the shadow of its source material, but still proves a solid, suitably discomfiting adaptation of a classic dystopian tale.

[24] Radford objected to Virgin's insistence on using the more pop-oriented electronic Eurythmics music, as the traditional orchestral score originally intended for the film had been composed entirely by Dominic Muldowney a few months earlier.

In November 1984, Virgin Records released the Eurythmics soundtrack album, containing considerably altered versions of their music heard in the film, under the title 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother).

Eurythmics responded with a statement of their own claiming no knowledge of prior agreements between Virgin and Radford/Muldowney and that they had accepted the offer to compose music for the film in good faith.

In 1999, Muldowney's complete orchestral score (24 tracks in total) was released on a special limited edition CD album under the title Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Music of Oceania, to commemorate the film's 15th anniversary.