Gus Van Sant returns with Dead Man’s Wire, a movie shot in the same late-70s hues as Kelly Reichardt’s recent gem The Mastermind, and likewise concerned with unlawful men and the paradox of a decent criminal. Van Sant’s movie, however, is far more willing to deliver on genre tropes than Reichardt’s marvelous subversion. Bill Skarsgård eats great swathes of scenery as the very real Tony Kiritsis, a man who kidnapped his mortgage broker in 1977 after failing to make payment on a potentially lucrative plot of land. Van Sant imagines this tale in a way that echoes Dog Day Afternoon: an unhinged and stranger-than-fiction fable about good intentions gone wrong. It’s kind of a hoot.
I wasn’t at all suprised to learn that Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage were circling the project as recently as last year––this is just the kind of juicy tale that you can imagine’s been dramatized multiple times before. Yet, aside from the 2018 documentary Dead Man’s Line, and the inevitable true-crime podcast American Hostage, it never has. The movie is a lively ensemble, is full of little creative swings and pulpy energy, but Kiritsis remains its central focus. The tricky part for Van Sant was to make the man, in some way, empathetic.
The story goes that the dejected Hoosier, smelling a conspiracy to rob him blind, decided to enter the offices of Meridian Mortgage Company and wire the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun to the head of president Richard Hall, with the other end wired to his own. Miraculously, the two of them made it all the way to Kiritsis’s apartment and holed up there for almost three days. Through Van Sant’s lens and Skarsgård’s performance, we never suspect Hall (who’s played here by Dacre Montgomery, best known as Max’s stepbrother in Stranger Things) will succumb to Stockholm syndrome, but the movie allows just enough tension to release between them to suggest that his opinion of the man might be softening.
While this central duo are the main event, Van Sant casts his net wide, allowing multiple active participants to get involved in the drama. Chief among them is Fred Heckman (portrayed with typical charm by Colman Domingo), a popular local radio DJ whom Kiritsis began calling into, and whom Heckman was encouraged to humor by the authorities. There is the young reporter Linda Page, a part that allows red hot Industry star Myha’la to don an afro. There is also Hall’s father, M.L., who’s played by Al Pacino with a wonderful southern drawl and who (like his performance in Juliea Schnabel’s In The Hand of Dante, which also premiered in Venice this week) never once stands up. I was particularly fond of the team of policemen and FBI guys, led by Cary Elwes (unrecognizable under a considerable beard). Aside from the latter, each cop played by a character actor with a nicely weathered face that I can’t recall ever seeing before.
The somewhat-distracting Skarsgård aside (he’s constantly at 12, when I feel a couple of 8.5s wouldn’t have hurt), it’s a deep and varied bench of enjoyable performances that, along with the movie’s aesthetic, feels convincingly in step with the era’s rhythms. It’s particularly nice to see Van Sant having so much fun in the sandbox here: images might freeze mid-shot; at other times the camera zooms unexpectedly, just for the jazzy thrill of it all. Harried TV reporters are forever trying to get the shot that will elevate their career to prime time––you know, that kind of stuff. Squint your eyes and it almost passes for the real thing.
Dead Man’s Wire is Van Sant’s first feature in seven years, a period during which his only output was directing eight episodes of the second series of Ryan Murphy’s Feud. The perfectly enjoyable (if largely forgotten) Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is basically the only acclaimed work he’s had since Milk––a film which, now 17 years old, could legally give blood in most states. Coming in the final days before critics started saving their thoughts for Twitter, Sea of Trees can at least claim to be the last movie to get truly booed at Cannes. I’m struggling to call Dead Man’s Wire a true return to form, but it will certainly do till one gets here.
Dead Man’s Wire premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire Offers a Good Time at the Movies first appeared on The Film Stage.
