“Dead Man’s Wire” was already in production when Luigi Mangione fatally shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. But you’d be forgiven for interpreting it as a reaction to those events. The film — director Gus Van Sant’s first since “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot” in 2018 — takes place in the 1970s, another decade when dissent fueled by economic stagnation exploded into politically charged violence. But its sympathy for its aggrieved antihero feels very current.
“Exploded” can be taken literally here, as Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) rigged his Indianapolis apartment with homemade munitions when he took his mortgage broker, Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), hostage there for 63 frozen hours in February 1977. This was in addition to the device that gives Van Sant’s movie its name, a wire that was attached to the trigger of a shotgun on one end, and looped around Hall’s head on the other. If Hall jerked too violently, let alone tried to run, the wire would pull the trigger, firing the shotgun Kiritsis had pointed at the back of Hall’s head.
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At risk of spoiling well-documented (if somewhat memory-holed) historical events, there are no “Scanners”-style shots of exploding heads in “Dead Man’s Wire.” The possibility feels very real in the magnificently tense opening scene, which counts down the minutes and seconds as Kiritsis takes Hall captive at his office and leads him several blocks through downtown Indianapolis with the titular device around his neck. Accompanied by Danny Elfman’s jazzy score, the sequence feels genuinely dangerous, as cops and onlookers alike stand dumbfounded at Kiritsis’ brazen gambit.
The possibility resurfaces later on as well, in moments where Kiritsis’ simmering resentment — he feels he’s been cheated out of his own personal American Dream, via a complicated struggle over a plot of land in rural Indiana — is brought to a boil by police interference. On the whole, however, “Dead Man’s Wire” has trouble maintaining suspense beyond that breathtaking opener. This weakness is partially baked into the story: Five days is a long time to hold your breath, and even Hall sleeps, albeit restlessly, over that time. The rest is a side effect of Van Sant’s storytelling style.
“Dead Man’s Wire” indulges in a cliché seen in many films based on a true story, namely showing footage of real people alongside the actors playing them. We see this in the closing credits, which is understandable enough; it becomes an issue when the footage overlaps with the fictionalized events unfolding onscreen. This is especially noticeable with a subplot involving Linda Page (Myha’la), an ambitious young news reporter usually sidelined to the ladies’ luncheon beat.
Page and her cameraman stumble onto the Kiritsis story very early on, and refuse to give it up once the higher-ups in the newsroom start paying attention as well. She serves as a sort of narrator, keeping the audience informed of new developments inside Kiritsis’ apartment once the standoff truly begins. Her reports are accompanied by actual archival news footage narrated by an older white male anchor; these don’t contradict Page’s updates, but they do pull focus away from her and her story.
This juxtaposition could be useful for illustrating Linda’s struggle to be taken seriously as a Black woman in an industry dominated by white men, but “Dead Man’s Wire” never quite gets there.
References to Kiritsis being a regular at a cop bar in Indianapolis, and therefore well known to officers like Detective Michael Grable (Cary Elwes), is another missed opportunity. We can infer that the police are treating him differently because he’s “one of them,” but this thread also gets lost as the number of characters and details expands throughout the film.
One peripheral character with enough gravity to keep the story in orbit is Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), a smooth-voiced morning radio DJ who serves as a reluctant, but sympathetic sounding board for the aggrieved kidnapper. (Kiritsis is a big fan, as we see in a cutaway shot to a promotional mug on his kitchen counter.) Temple keeps his perspective on Kiritsis’ actions to himself; for the most part, he seems anxious about keeping his wife waiting at home. It’s an everyman perspective that dovetails with Kiritsis’ own, making Temple the most successful of several characters Van Sant uses to move the story forward.
Temple is introduced at the very beginning of the film through a closeup of his mouth speaking into a microphone, a nod to the DJ-narrator in Walter Hill’s “The Warriors.” Although, again, it loses momentum as the film’s scope widens, there’s a brusque efficiency to the visual storytelling in “Dead Man’s Wire” that calls back to ‘70s classics like “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” The editing in particular has a pleasingly punchy no-bullshit feel about it, using juxtaposition to make its points cleanly and clearly.
There’s a hint of tongue-in-cheek irony in the way Van Sant nods to his ‘70s influences, as well as in the needle drops that are scattered throughout the film. (Kiritsis’ burn-it-down radio rants are paired with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” for example.) Where Van Sant gets serious is in the film’s incendiary final stretch, which seems to agree with many of the characters that Kiritsis is a folk hero.
The film’s only real villain is Al Pacino, doing a Colonel Sanders accent as Richard’s father M.L. Hall, whose pitiless rigidity stands in for capitalism as a whole. The elder Hall’s indifference toward his son’s life shocks even his captor, prompting a bonding moment that softens the viewer’s perceptions of both men. These scenes, which take place in Kiritsis’ apartment midway through the siege, briefly pull “Dead Man’s Wire” back into focus, clarifying its thesis about how the big guys prosper while the little guys get screwed.
One does not hire Bill Skarsgård unless one is looking for a lanky, off-putting weirdo. But Skarsgård does a good job of making his character’s frustration and rising panic grounded and relatable. This helps immensely when we get to the finale, which complicates the us-vs-them narrative. Ultimately, “Dead Man’s Wire” concedes that Kiritsis’ violent actions had more negative effects than positive ones. But the man still had a point.
Grade: B-
“Dead Man’s Wire” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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