The same weekend that Ben Affleck are reuniting for a high-profile Netflix crime picture, the director who helped put them both on the map is making a quiet but notable return to movie theaters. Gus Van Sant, who directed the Boston boys and their Good Will Hunting script, returns with the wider release of Dead Man’s Wire, which received a brief awards-qualifying run in 2025 and a one-week limited run leading up to its national rollout. Though Van Sant has, like a lot of indie-skewing directors of his era, added working in television to his repertoire over the past few years, it’s still striking that Dead Man’s Wire is his first feature in seven years. It’s by far his longest break in his 40-year career.
This is a man whose generally prolific career could not be slowed by following up Good Will Hunting (his biggest hit and a decidedly mainstream turn from the director of My Own Private Idaho) with a reviled shot-for-shot remake of Psycho and a more vaguely disliked sorta-retread of Good Will Hunting (Finding Forrester, perhaps best known for Sean Connery’s brogue-dependent reading of the line “you’re the man now, dawg!”). At that point, Van Sant simply scaled back down and refocused on characters who find themselves both marginalized and spotlighted at once: The Beckett-ish hikers of the minimalist Gerry, the school shooters of the harrowing Elephant, and the Cobain-modeled rock star puttering around his home in Last Days. This informal “death trilogy” had a postscript with the skater-centric (and similarly doomy) Paranoid Park. Then he made another Oscar darling with Milk, a biopic about the gay-rights icon Harvey Milk, which won Sean Penn his second Best Actor Oscar.
There was no particular post-Milk flop that sent Van Sant back to Psycho-era notoriety. There were several little-seen projects with major stars, especially The Sea of Trees, an early A24 release starring a post-comeback Matthew McConaughey that seems like it should have been a much bigger deal. (Reviews were largely poisonous.) But for the most part, Van Sant receded from the big screen as quietly as he persevered at previous low ebbs.
Dead Man’s Wire fits with Van Sant’s ongoing interest in outsiders, though it’s more specifically filtered through cinema of the past than some of his more experimental, immediate works. Based on a true story and set in 1977, the movie follows Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), an Indianapolis man who takes banker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) hostage after a financial falling-out with the institution. (He secured a loan to buy some property and sell it to a shopping-center chain, only to have the bank make its own deal without him.) Tony engineers a “dead man’s wire,” a contraption that will trigger a shotgun blast to the victim’s head if he attempts to escape, or if Tony is harmed, and brings Hall from his office to Tony’s apartment building, attracting heavy news coverage and police attention.
Richard Hall isn’t actually Tony’s intended target; he’s scheduled a meeting with Richard’s father M.L. Hall (Pacino), a more obviously puffed-up and self-important man who, when greeted with his son’s predicament, nonetheless refuses to express any remorse to Tony whatsoever, on principle. Tony is more flexible; he goes ahead with Richard in M.L.’s place, alternately cordial to his new hostage and apoplectic about how the financial system has screwed him over. He’s obviously unstable, despite the perfectly reasonable foundation for his anger.
Dead Man’s Wire doesn’t closely resemble many other Van Sant movies. In a weird way, it’s closest to a pair that seem wholly incompatible: His ’90s media satire To Die For, where Nicole Kidman plays a weather girl murderously obsessed with climbing the ladder of celebrity, and his aforementioned Psycho experiment. Dead Man’s Wire isn’t as satirical about the media as To Die For, and its observational eye feels more akin to the Psycho project, where he re-shot Hitchcock’s famous proto-slasher in color, and with a very 1998 cast, changing very little else – but, by virtue of doing it at all, changing plenty, as if he was watching himself rewatch Psycho.
Dead Man’s Wire isn’t tasked with so meticulously recreating the ’70s movies that inspired it, but it has a similar relationship with them. Its most obvious connection is with the hostage dramedy Dog Day Afternoon, right down to bringing in Dog Day’s Pacino for a small role on the other side of the negotiation this time. Yet despite the grainy textures and squarer aspect ratio, Van Sant isn’t really making a retro pastiche. His occasionally switches to even grainier video-style footage reflect the period, but not particularly the style of movies made back then, and though thrillers like Dog Day Afternoon wind and digress more readily than their contemporary counterparts, they also often buzz with an intensity that Dead Man’s Wire lacks, seemingly by design. It feels slightly dispassionate, even when it generates feelings of warm humanity for a scene or two at a time.
Good Will Hunting is notable because it’s one of the few times Van Sant has seemed entirely comfortable working in mainstream mode. A reteaming with Damon, 2012’s little-seen Promised Land, is more schematic as social drama, and his previous movie, 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is gently prickly compared to other biopics. If there’s a remove in his work, it’s not chilly or calculating. It’s more like he doesn’t feel right interfering. That’s precisely what makes Elephant and Last Days so particularly indelible; Van Sant turns himself into a fly on the wall, despite only taking inspiration from real-life subjects.
A version of Dead Man’s Wire in that style might have been more gripping than the semi-traditional version he made instead, though we can only speculate. Maybe Van Sant wanted to reach more people, as the real Tony did. Regardless, there’s something compelling in this more glancing, momentary treatment of potentially white-knuckle (or experimental) material. As the hours of the hostage situation drag on, there are moments of suspense, frustration, human connection, and… tedium, it turns out. It’s not exactly a listless picture, but despite the dramatization it does have a documentary-style quality. (Van Sant consulted with the filmmakers behind a doc of the same name in making it.) When Van Sant briefly stages another encounter between Richard and Tony at the very end of the film, it’s appropriately inarticulate. They see each other, and see themselves in each other, but don’t seem to know what to do with this. Van Sant isn’t so didactic as to trace the events of Dead Man’s Wire all the way to 2025, whether in terms of true crime, media coverage, economic rage, or bankers’ arrogance. For the moment, he’s just watching carefully.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.