REEL | Gus Van Sant Takes 'Dead Man's Wire' Hostage x TIFF 2025

"I'm a man that's fighting for everything he owns, sir."

Toronto International Film Festival

Dead Man's Wire, directed by veteran filmmaker Gus Van Sant, depicts the actual 1977 kidnapping by an otherwise mild-mannered Indianapolis man, Tony Kiritsis, played convincingly by a haggard Bill Skarsgård, of his bank mortgage officer (Dacre Montgomery). What follows is a detailed dramatization of the 63-hour hostage crisis standoff and subsequent media circus that would later echo through modern American media and culture.

From first-time feature screenwriter Austin Kolodney, the unsettling docu-drama thriller unfolds from different points of view, including supporting characters played by Cary Elwes, Myha'la Herrold, Colman Domingo and Al Pacino, representing different perspectives of the police, television, radio, and others directly involved in the hostage situation. It's a deliberately didactic exercise in violent retribution of righteous justice, with Skarsgård fully committing to the Kiritsis' sense of justified maniacal anger boiling over.

Dead Man's Wire urgently mirrors elements of the Al Pacino/Sidney Lumet classic, Dog Day Afternoon, with its raw presience half a century after both real-life incidents. It triggers another intimately hard-boiled, 1970s working-class saga of fighting back against the establishment through supremely ill-advised actions. Van Sant's steady directorial hand grounds the bizarre true story of an ordinary man meeting his breaking point with inappropriate vigour to its catharsis.

Dead Man's Wire screened at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations program.


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