DEAD MAN’S WIRE
Directed by: Gus Van Sant Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Al Pacino Certificate: tbc Released: 20 March 2026 Rating: 7/10
"There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay," insisted Gil Scott-Heron in 1970, but not even he could foresee our present media environment where state goons summarily execute citizens and the camera-phone footage goes viral on social media. Following its central role in One Battle After Another, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" makes a follow-up appearance over the credits of Dead Man’s Wire, a dramatisation of the events of 1977 when aggrieved small businessman Tony Kiritsis kidnapped his mortgage broker and held him hostage in his Indianapolis apartment for two days with the muzzle of a 12-gauge Winchester 1400 wired to his head.
The story has been told and retold in recent documentaries and podcasts, but shows up as a feature film in 2026 presumably in the context of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by the telegenic assassin, Luigi Mangione. Like Mangione, Kiritsis became a fleeting folk hero, calling in to his local radio station mid-kidnapping to make his case that the system is rigged against the little guy. Could the sympathy he engendered have influenced his eventual trial, where he was found not guilty (albeit by virtue of insanity)?
Dead Man’s Wire is operating through several layers of mediation. On one level it is a loving homage to the paranoid mid-70s cinema of Sidney Lumet – in particular Dog Day Afternoon (and the star of that film, Al Pacino, offers a rather overripe cameo here as the disinterested father of the hostage). On another level it feels like a very late entry to the sub-Tarantino wave of ironic heist pics, complete with a superfly local radio DJ (Colman Domingo, a little wasted as Fred Temple) contributing impeccable needle-drops, from Deodato’s jazz-funk "Also Sprach Zarathustra" through Yes’s "I’ve Seen All Good People" and Labi Siffre’s "Cannock Chase".
It is also the latest entry in the long-running mystery of Gus Van Sant’s career. Supposedly Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage were previously attached to the project – the mind reels at the paranoid epic they might have cooked up together – but the final form finds Van Sant, in his first film in seven years, on his best mainstream behaviour. There is scarcely a hint of the onetime poet of lonesome hobos or even the morbid media satire of To Die For – subplots following a rookie news reporter and an overearnest FBI agent go precisely nowhere. What we do have is a fine central performance from Bill Skarsgård, trimming back his moustache after last year’s Nosferatu, that possibly renders this particular outlaw folk hero a little too sympathetic.
