Dead Man's Wire

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. In 1977, an Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis 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.

Bill Skarsgård, as tense and pop-eyed as a character in The Simpsons, plays the paranoid and rage-filled Kiritsis. Al Pacino has an uproarious cameo in the “southern gentleman” voice that he has adopted these days. Myha’la plays a fictionalised TV reporter determined not to be cheated of her scoop, and Colman Domingo has a richly enjoyable role as an imperturbably laid-back radio DJ, based on a real life Indianapolis radio star, whom Kiritsis actually did call up to broadcast his grievances on the air.

“A playfully chaotic crime thriller with comedic undertones so bizarrely entertaining you laugh even as you flinch.” –Rahul Menon, Script Magazine

Explore the full programme at nziff.co.nz.