Gus Van Sant has always been at his best when he’s looking at people who are completely falling apart at the seams. Think about the drifters in My Own Private Idaho, the isolated teenagers in Paranoid Park, or the kids wandering the hallways in Elephant. He doesn’t really do glossy, manufactured Hollywood drama. He likes the weird, messy, uncomfortable corners of real life where there are no clean resolutions. With Dead Man’s Wire, he’s found a real-life historical subject that fits his entire cinematic worldview like a glove. It is a story that is almost too bizarre and intense to be true, but it actually happened back in the dead of winter in 1977 in Indianapolis.
The film covers the stranger-than-fiction story of Tony Kiritsis, an ordinary, middle-aged guy who got so utterly pushed to the edge by his mortgage company that he snapped. In a state of pure, manic desperation, he wired a live, sawed-off shotgun directly to a banker’s neck with a complex system of wire and a dead man's switch, holding him hostage for sixty-three exhausting hours.
Instead of turning this insane premise into a cheap, fast-paced action thriller with heroic cops shouting through megaphones and tactical teams scaling the walls, Van Sant does something much more interesting and deeply uncomfortable. He turns it into a gritty, claustrophobic, freezing-cold character study. The camera lingers in the cramped, poorly lit spaces of a sixties-style apartment, forcing the audience to sit in the heavy, suffocating silence right alongside the characters. It is a slow-burn pressure cooker of a film that values human friction over Hollywood explosions.
The whole movie lives and dies on Bill Skarsgård’s performance as Tony, and he is absolutely electric here. He plays Tony not as some slick, calculating criminal mastermind, but as this incredibly twitchy, sweating, frantic guy who is just utterly convinced he’s being cheated by a faceless corporate machine. Tony wanted to build a shopping center, the bank foreclosed on him, and in his mind, they didn't just take his land, they ruined his entire life and stripped away his dignity. Skarsgård plays him with this volatile, unpredictable energy where you’re never quite sure if he’s about to burst into tears, apologize to his hostage, or accidentally pull the trigger because his hand is shaking so hard. It is a terrifyingly raw performance because he makes Tony feel so human and pathetic, rather than a cartoonish movie villain.
Opposite him is Dacre Montgomery, who plays Richard Hall, the unlucky mortgage broker who gets grabbed. Montgomery has a really tough job here because he spends most of the movie with a barrel of a gun literally strapped to his head, but he plays the sheer, exhausting terror of that situation perfectly. He’s not a hero; he’s just a regular guy who wants to go home to his family, terrified that one wrong move, a sudden panic attack, or a physical sneeze from Tony is going to blow his head off. You can see the physical toll the hours take on him, from the sweat stains on his polyester shirt to the way his voice completely breaks down as the standoff drags into its second and third days.
The dynamic between them is incredibly tense, mostly because they are stuck in this dingy, stifling apartment for sixty-three hours. The film highlights the strange, twisted intimacy that develops between a captor and a hostage. They argue about the mortgage, they talk about their families, and at times, they almost seem to find a bizarre common ground, only for the cold reality of the wire around Hall's neck to shatter the illusion.
But Van Sant also zooms out to show the absolute media circus happening outside the apartment walls. You have Colman Domingo playing Fred Temple, a local radio host who ends up talking to Tony live on the air. Domingo is fantastic because he’s the only person who treats Tony like a human being instead of a monster or a news headline, trying to keep him calm while the rest of the media is just drooling for a violent ending. On the other side, Myha'la plays a young, ambitious TV reporter who is obviously horrified by what's happening, but also knows this is the biggest break of her career. The film brilliantly captures that era of television news where live broadcasts were just starting to become a major force, reflecting on how quickly the American media machine can turn real, horrible tragedies into prime-time entertainment for people sitting at home eating dinner.
What I love about this film is that it doesn’t take the easy way out. It would be so easy to make Tony a folk hero fighting against the big, bad banks, or just write him off as a complete lunatic who belongs in a cell. The movie does a really great job of walking that line. You get why Tony is furious. The mid-seventies economic collapse was brutal, and the system really was rigged against the little guy who didn't have high-priced lawyers to protect them. The film is shot in this miserable, gray, washed-out palette that makes Indianapolis look incredibly bleak, so you feel that heavy, depressing weight of financial ruin. But at the same time, the movie never lets you forget that Tony is doing a monstrous thing to an innocent kid who didn't even make the rules. It shows the devastating collateral damage of one man's crusade for personal justice.
There are some great small roles too. Al Pacino shows up briefly as the big boss of the mortgage company, looking incredibly rich and totally out of reach. It really drives home the tragedy of the whole thing: Tony is destroying his own life and traumatizing this poor kid, while the actual guys who ruined him are sitting in warm offices miles away, completely untouched.
Danny Elfman did the music, and it’s not his usual big, whimsical stuff. It’s this weird, jangly, slightly off-key soundtrack that fits Tony's chaotic brain perfectly. It actually makes some of the darker, more absurd moments of the standoff feel strangely funny, even though you’re still holding your breath.
By the time the movie ends, you don't really feel like cheering. It’s just a really heavy, exhausting look at what happens when a regular person snaps under the pressure of a system that doesn't care about them. Dead Man's Wire is easily the best thing Gus Van Sant has made in a long time. It’s tense, it’s angry, and it doesn't give you any easy answers.
If you want to see this whole nightmare play out for yourself, the movie is actually available to buy starting today on both digital platforms and physical media. It is definitely the kind of film that benefits from a high-quality home release, especially since so much of the tension relies on those quiet, dark, claustrophobic indoor scenes and the incredible, scratchy sound design of the shotgun rig. It is well worth grabbing a copy if you are a fan of Van Sant’s older, grittier work, or if you just want to watch two great actors push each other to the absolute limit in a tiny room.
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