Dead Man’s Wire Proves Gus Van Sant Movies Still Matter
Don’t let Gus Van Sant’s long-awaited comeback fall through the cracks.
Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) sits in his shabby, beat-down car outside a dreary block of office buildings, his arm in a sling and his face covered in a sheen of sweat that seems out-of-place for the cold February day. He turns his key, and it breaks in the ignition. Cursing, he stumbles out of his car and towards the building across the street, his one good arm carrying an unwieldy cardboard box. It’s downtown Indianapolis in the dead of winter, 1977. And Tony Kiritsis is about to kick off a media sensation that will grip the nation.
It’s a low-key start to a relatively small movie, one that seems an unlikely comeback for Gus Van Sant, the director behind such classics as My Own Private Idaho and Good Will Hunting. But Dead Man’s Wire, which is inspired by the true story of a three-day hostage standoff, is a taut, screwy crime thriller that plays like gangbusters from the moment that Tony Kiritsis whips a shotgun out of his box and takes his mortgage broker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage. It’s a thrilling comeback for Van Sant, who hadn’t had a major critical hit since 2008’s Milk and whose last film, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, was released eight years ago. And though Dead Man’s Wire, with its quiet January release, seems destined to be similarly as forgotten as Van Sant’s other recent films, its surprisingly timely story and crowdpleasing antics make it a movie that deserves better than to be buried.
When I saw Dead Man’s Wire at the Venice Film Festival in September 2025, it may have had the most uproarious reaction of any other film I’d seen there. Yes, more than Frankenstein, more than After the Hunt, and more than Bugonia (it was more or less equal footing to the reaction that Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice received). People gasped, clapped, and cheered — a sure sign of a major festival hit. But it took a week for Dead Man’s Wire to be acquired (by Row K Entertainment) and another month before it even got a release date. And then, the dreaded January release, the long-dreaded “graveyard” for movies.
But Dead Man’s Wire is more than its January release date. A lightweight Dog Day Afternoon riff, Dead Man’s Wire oozes with a style (mostly supplied by Colman Domingo’s velvety-voiced radio DJ, who becomes an unexpected player in the hostage crisis) and energy, with its ‘70s-set story offering more than a few parallels to contemporary concerns. Tony Kiritsis, you see, feels wronged and cornered after a bad deal with his mortgage broker robbed him of (what he thinks) is millions of dollars. Now Tony is here representing the little guy, the people who have been forgotten and trampled upon by millionaires who couldn’t care less about them.
Played with a wide-eyed frenzy by Skarsgård, who expertly toggles between sympathetic hero and unhinged antagonist, Tony’s ravings seem ridiculous at first.
As we spend more time with Tony, his arguments start to make sense, especially as we watch it through the lens of 2026, where economic uncertainty seeps into every aspect of life. He even seems to have the sympathies of the police, chiefly because the lead detective (an unrecognizable Cary Elwes) is an old family friend. But the media circus that pops up around Tony — which he delights in — mostly gawks at him, turning the whole nation into a country of voyeurs.
Colman Domingo is another standout in the film, as the cool and collected radio DJ Fred Temple.
But Van Sant doesn’t give too much focus to the media, apart from ambitious reporter Linda Page, handling this storyline with a light satirical touch (one scene has a clueless reporter simply describing his feelings on live TV). Instead, the film plays out mostly as a two-hander between Skarsgard’s Tony and Montgomery’s Richard, who wasn’t actually his first choice for hostage; Tony had planned to kidnap Richard’s father, M.L. Hall (a blasé Al Pacino). As Richard spends the long hours strung up to Tony’s shotgun with a “dead man’s wire” (aka, any movement and the shotgun goes off), he and Tony strike up a strangely intimate connection. Skarsgard and Montgomery both deliver profoundly sympathetic and magnetic performances, and half the joy of watching Dead Man’s Wire is to see them verbally sparring.
Dead Man’s Wire is one of those stranger-than-fiction stories that, in an even stranger twist, feels even more relevant today. But despite its semi-satirical edge and crowd-pleasing energy, Dead Man’s Wire feels like an important watch. Don’t let it pass you by.
