Dead Man's Wire (2025)

Gus Van Sant returns to the big screen with a film that feels like it was made back in the 1970’s. The film is the story of Tony Kiritsis who took a bank executive hostage by tying a shotgun to the man’s head with a wire. Kiritsis then turned everything into a media circus in order to get his point across that he was screwed by the bank and that its practices were at best predatory and at worst criminal.

Feeling like a slice of life 50 years ago, the film feels like the world I walked through in 1977 when I was a teenager. Nothing seems off. I say this up front because there have been several films recently (I’m looking at you MASTERMIND) that were set in the 70’s and felt like dress up.  While Van Sant mirrors the actual events, he doesn’t go for exact recreations of the video from the event with the result the film feels alive and not just a tableau. He also keeps the film feeling pitch perfect because he makes sure the film has the innocence of the time. The events happened because we are not as security conscious as we are now. What happened was because of when things happened and we are willing to go with it partly because this is what happened but also because we never get lost in cynicism.

The cast is first rate and to be honest outside of Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis and Al Pacino as the owner of the bank, I had no idea who anyone was because they disappeared into their roles.

I like how Van Sant managed to keep the tension and yet keep the inherent humor.  This is a dangerous situation but there is a genuine absurdity to it all. We laugh and we wince, and we are forced to think at the insanity of events that transpired to make iritsis have to resort to taking a man hostage to be heard. If this was today, we probably would have had another Luigi Mangione case.

Van Sant also masterfully uses music to accent everything. Using period appropriate needle drops to move us. I never expected to hear several of the songs in a context of a hostage drama, but it works.

What an absolute gem of a film.

I have no idea how this will fare at the box office when it opens but I think this film will have a long life down the road as filmmakers see what Van Sant and his crew have done and as real life bends around more and more making the story of Kiritsis relevant to what is happening in the world today.

Highly recommended.