Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire has the bones of a taut pressure cooker, a true-story hostage standoff that should play like a noose tightening. Bill Skarsgård is Tony Kiritsis, a lower-middle-class real estate developer turned live wire, convinced he has been cheated by mortgage banker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery). In a desperate bid for retribution, Tony rigs a shotgun to his own neck with the titular “dead man’s wire,” takes Richard hostage, and demands a fortune and an apology. The premise is instantly cinematic, and Van Sant clearly understands the pull of a community watching a crisis become entertainment, with public sympathy bending in unsettling directions when class resentment gets a face.
That overlap of media, crime, and morality is where Dead Man’s Wire should sing, and in flashes it does. Colman Domingo’s local radio host Fred Temple is the film’s most grounded presence, the rare figure Tony will actually listen to, and Domingo plays the role with a steady warmth that suggests he understands the danger without turning it into spectacle.
Skarsgård downplays his usual star aura with an anxious, blue-collar specificity, and he sells the exhausting push-pull of a man who wants to be heard more than he wants to be saved. You can feel why Van Sant was drawn to the material, it echoes the uneasy tabloid electricity of To Die For and the outsider ache that runs through so much of his best work.
The problem is that Van Sant pitches almost everything down, and the movie never fully commits to being either a gripping thriller or a sharp, clarifying character study. For a story with such an inherently frightening mechanism, the filmmaking often treats the kidnapping like an odd detour in a hangout movie, coated in a soft, ’70s pastiche that sometimes reads as dress-up more than immersion.
The tension should be unbearable. Instead it drifts, and the film’s stance on Tony’s “ends justify the means” logic gets muddy in a way that feels less provocative than undercooked. A few supporting beats help, including Al Pacino in a small role that adds bite to the class dynamics, but the movie keeps sliding back into a middle lane where it observes without really interrogating.
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I did not hate it. I just wanted it to either go harder on suspense or dig deeper into the moral wreckage that makes a situation like this curdle into folk-hero mythology. Dead Man’s Wire has strong casting, a premise that practically generates dread on its own, and a director with real history in this terrain. It just never quite grabs a lane and floors it.
Score: 5/10
Dead Man’s Wire (2026)
- Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Al Pacino, Colman Domingo, Myha’la Herrold
- Director: Gus Van Sant
- Genre: Crime, Drama
- Runtime: 105 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: January 16, 2026
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