On Tuesday, February 8th 1977, Tony Kiritsis, hardworking resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, walked into the offices of Meridian Mortgage and wired the muzzle of a shotgun to the back of his mortgage broker’s head, believing him to be conspiring to take his real estate from him. He called the police, alerted them that he was taking the hostage, Richard Hall, back to his apartment, and proceeded to keep him there for 63 hours, at times parading him around on national television all while feeding his demands to local radio newsman Fred Heckman.
Enter Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, a dramatization of the documentary of the same name which tracks Kiritsis (played by Bill Skarsgård) from the minute he enters the Halls’ offices as a man with a plan. Kiritsis had certainly thought it through – the dead man’s wire in question thread around his hostage’s head and his own, so that if anyone shot Kiritsis, or Hall tried to escape, the shotgun would go off. Murky with the feeling of a winter in the 70s, it’s a fantastically shot entertainment fest from beginning to end, supported by a naturally fascinating piece of source material and a brilliant cast, all as twisted as they are funny. While Skarsgård plays Kiritsis with gusto and sweaty enthusiasm (at times, his accentuated lankiness and fevered lip-licking is reminiscent of Matthew Lillard’s Stu in Scream), it is Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things’ unsavoury Billy) who comes out on top as the pitiable Richard Hall, caught up in the crossfire of Kiritsis’ rage and his own father’s (a cameo from Al Pacino) intransigence, who isn’t bothered enough by his son’s kidnapping to cancel his holiday. Effortlessly pivoting between managing Kiritsis’ outbursts and the genuine sadness of a child abandoned by a parent, Montgomery is at his most vulnerable and raw here, much like Skarsgård, who can do nothing but spit insults and make the most ridiculous of requests in an attempt to see justice be served. As the drama unfolds, both men reach a certain level of desperation – the little man wants his money, the big man wants his life. While it is somewhat of an interesting choice to cast thirty somethings as middle-aged men worn down by time and grief, the two of them embody it excellently, developing an unlikely chemistry over the shotgun. There are laughs here and there, moments of tenderness, of sharing respective struggles – a reminder that the surface is rarely the full picture – and, even, a strange sequence in which Kiritsis dances while Hall looks on, both vaguely amused and concerned. Even stranger is the obsession Kiritsis develops with local radio DJ Fred Temple (altered from Heckman), dramatized exquisitely by Colman Domingo, whose voice adds both 70s retro allure and humour to an otherwise alarming situation. This is perhaps Dead Man’s Wire’s greatest strength – rather than what could have been a straight thriller, Van Sant brilliantly plays off of the absurdity of the situation and gives it a comical spin, making it feel more like an improbable buddy road trip than a hostage situation. For Domingo’s suave, grandiose voice or Skarsgård bizarrely moving his hips to the music while holding a shotgun to a man’s face, I’d happily watch it again.
