Dead Man's Wire
3.5/5
January releases often get dumped and forgotten, but Dead Man’s Wire is worth leaving the house for. Gus Van Sant’s latest, based on a true story I knew nothing about going in, is one of those “stranger than fiction” thrillers that keeps tightening the screws until you realize you’ve been holding your breath.
Bill Skarsgård is magnetic as Tony Kiritsis, who storms into a mortgage office and takes one of its family owners hostage using a shotgun rigged with a literal dead man’s wire—one wrong move and he dies. It’s an absurdly grim setup, and Austin Kolodney’s screenplay finds something unsettlingly modern inside a story that happened nearly fifty years ago. Van Sant and Elfman score the film like a 1970s crime movie, with needle drops I kept recognizing (including two from One Battle After Another and Sentimental Value), even though what it’s really saying about money and power feels more prescient than anything else.
Skarsgård pulls off a tricky balancing act: Tony is clearly committing a crime, but he’s also weirdly funny, oddly sympathetic, and, frequently, the most clear-eyed person in the room. You catch yourself rooting for him and then not so immediately questioning why. The supporting cast only sharpens that tension—Colman Domingo and Myha’la as proto-influencers circling the spectacle, Al Pacino as a truly vile patriarch, and Dacre Montgomery as a small, sad cog in America’s money machine.
By the end, Dead Man’s Wire feels less like a period piece than a reminder: the systems chewing people up today aren’t new. They’ve just gotten better.