Although director Gus Van Sant hasn’t made a feature film since 2018’s strange but endearing Don’t Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (he also directed six of the eight episodes of the second season of Feud), he hasn’t gotten any less curious about the best way to tell a story that feels weirdly timely, despite it being set in 1977.
On a cold winter’s day in Indianapolis, a would-be entrepreneur named Tony Kiritsis (a remarkable, unhinged performance by Bill Skarsgård) walks into the office of his mortgage company and takes Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery), the son of the manager M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), hostage by running a wire from the man’s neck to the trigger of a sawed-off shotgun. If the man tries to run or Tony is killed, the shotgun goes off and takes Hall’s head with it. With police surrounding them but helpless to do anything, they take the short journey to Tony’s apartment complex and hole up there while negotiations begin. What Dead Man’s Wire does so beautifully is show how the mortgage company’s greed and bad-faith practices made Tony feel like he had no other choice but to go to such extremes to get his money back and, most importantly, an apology from M.L. Hall.
Tony enlists members of the police force whom he knows from a local bar, as well as a popular local DJ, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), to get his message out to the people about why he’s doing this. There’s also Linda Page (Myha’la), a young Black television reporter getting her first real news story to cover. The film’s strength is that we feel deeply for what Tony is going though even as we disagree with his methods and the way he soaks in the attention. He was absolutely cheated by this mortgage company (although not by Dick specifically), and Van Sant captures the way many members of the public sided with his actions and demands. Leaning heavily into the 1970s of it all, Van Sant clearly uses Dog Day Afternoon as an inspiration, but makes this story his own with Skarsgård absolutely dominating the landscape, as he often does, by being a master of mimicry and character details.
Dead Man's Wire is now playing in theaters.
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