Dead Man's Wire review Gus Van Sant calls the shots with surreal true-crime thriller

"With terrific chutzpah, black-comic flair and cool, cruel unsentimentality, screenwriter Austin Kolodney and director Gus Van Sant have made a true-crime suspense thriller set in the 1970s, tapping into the spirit of both Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Apart from anything else, it is a reminder that in that post-Kennedy, post-Watergate age, plenty of lawless and febrile things happened that would now be considered phenomena purely attributable to social media."

"In 1977, an Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis, with many acquaintances in the police department, kidnapped a mortgage broker named Richard Hall, and tied Hall's neck with a dead man's wire to his shotgun, which would therefore go off if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. Kiritsis even paraded his victim like this on TV while he read out his demands, a grotesque display in which national TV networks were blandly complicit."

"Van Sant's recreation of this extraordinary moment calls to mind the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in front of police and press. Kiritsis had mortgaged himself to buy land he thought could be developed as a shopping mall, but fell behind with the loan repayments and became convinced perhaps not without reason that Hall and his fellow mortgage broker father were manipulating and exploiting the situation with secret designs on his land."

Screenwriter Austin Kolodney and director Gus Van Sant crafted a 1970s-set true-crime suspense thriller that channels Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and Network. The film reenacts the 1977 Tony Kiritsis case in which Kiritsis kidnapped mortgage broker Richard Hall and wired a shotgun to Hall's neck so it would fire if sharpshooters shot. Kiritsis paraded Hall on live television while reading demands, revealing national networks' bland complicity. The film evokes Jack Ruby's killing of Lee Harvey Oswald and situates Kiritsis's motive in failed mall development financing and perceived exploitation by mortgage brokers. Performances include Bill Skarsgard as Kiritsis, Dacre Montgomery as Hall, Al Pacino as Hall's father, and Myha'la as a fictional TV reporter, Linda Page.

Read at www.theguardian.com