Review: Dead Man's Wire

What does it mean to faithfully dramatize recent history when the facts themselves are already stranger, messier, and more revealing than fiction? That tension sits at the center of Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s return to true-crime filmmaking and a movie that’s at its most compelling when it sticks close to the ugly particulars of one man’s grievance, and most frustrating when it reshapes them into something smoother, safer, and less specific.

The real Tony Kiritsis was a local Indianapolis eccentric with a chip on his shoulder and a deeply personal sense of injustice. In February 1977, he kidnapped his mortgage broker, Richard Hall, rigging a shotgun to Hall’s neck with a literal dead man’s wire and daring the city to listen to him. A working-class man turned himself into a media spectacle long before such gestures became commonplace. Van Sant clearly understands the power of that setup, and Dead Man’s Wire opens with a bravura sequence that counts down the seconds as Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) leads Hall (Dacre Montgomery) through downtown streets, cops frozen in disbelief, the wire taut, the threat immediate and horrifying. For a moment, the film feels electric.

That tension is hard to sustain over the next two hours, though, and not just because the outcome is well documented. Van Sant has always been more interested in mood than mechanics, and once the standoff settles into its 63-hour duration, Dead Man’s Wire begins to drift. The suspense ebbs and flows, replaced by a looser, episodic structure that jumps between Kiritsis’ apartment, the police response, and the media circus forming outside. The filmmaking is handsome and assured, Danny Elfman’s jazzy score hums with anxious energy, and the production design beautifully evokes a pre-Reagan America where shag carpet and bad paneling seemed to close in on everyone but the narrative spine never quite tightens again.

Some of that has to do with the film’s most significant departure from reality. In real life, Kiritsis insisted on speaking to Fred Heckman, a trusted, steady newsman whose calm authority helped defuse the situation. Here, Heckman becomes Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), a smooth-voiced soul DJ whose primary qualification is being “someone Kiritsis likes.” Domingo is predictably excellent, bringing warmth and gravity to a role that risks collapsing into cliché, but the change muddies the film’s ideas about media trust and responsibility. By transforming a respected news figure into a quasi-mythic radio presence, Dead Man’s Wire gestures toward themes such as race, representation, the power of the voice on the airwaves but never fully interrogates it into the narrative.

Elsewhere, Van Sant indulges in familiar true-story tics. The inclusion of archival footage alongside staged scenes is meant to lend authenticity, but it often does the opposite, pulling focus away from the actors and flattening the drama. A subplot involving an ambitious young reporter (Myha’la) hints at institutional sexism and newsroom politics, yet it’s sketched so lightly that it feels more like a checklist item than a meaningful perspective. These threads might have enriched the film, but instead they diffuse its energy.

Still, there’s something undeniably compelling about Skarsgård’s performance. He plays Kiritsis not as a grand ideologue but as a man vibrating with grievance, pride, and creeping panic. His Tony isn’t charming, exactly, but he’s understandable in a way that’s unsettling. Van Sant leans into that ambiguity, framing Kiritsis as a folk hero figure while never fully endorsing his actions. Montgomery as Hall shines the brightest perhaps. He adds emotional depth to what could have been a two dimensional villain. The film’s clearest villain is capitalism itself, embodied in Al Pacino’s cartoonishly callous turn as Hall’s father, a performance so broad it nearly derails the movie.

In the end, Dead Man’s Wire feels torn between fidelity and mythmaking. It wants to honor the specificity of a bizarre, telling episode in American history, but it also wants to sand down its rough edges into something more symbolic and palatable. What’s left is a film that looks and sounds right, occasionally crackles with urgency, and asks provocative questions without always trusting the real story to answer them on its own.

3/5