Dead Man’s Wire Trailer: Gus Van Sant Tells a True Kidnapping Story

Returning with his first feature in seven years, Gus Van Sant premiered Dead Man’s Wire at Venice Film Festival and it’ll now arrive before the end of the year. Starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Myha’la, Colman Domingo, and Al Pacino, the new distributor Row K Entertainment will give the thriller an awards-qualifying run beginning December 12, followed by a theatrical release on January 9. Ahead of the roll-out, the first full-length trailer has arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “Based on a true story, the 1977 kidnapping of a prominent banker grips the nation and turns the abductor into an outlaw folk hero. As the media frenzy peaks, the standoff becomes a spectacle of desperation, defiance and blurred justice, which resonates even today.”

Rory O’Connor said in his Venice review, “Gus Van Sant returns with Dead Man’s Wire, a movie shot in the same late-70s hues as Kelly Reichardt’s recent gem The Mastermind, and likewise concerned with unlawful men and the paradox of a decent criminal. Van Sant’s movie, however, is far more willing to deliver on genre tropes than Reichardt’s marvelous subversion. Bill Skarsgård eats great swathes of scenery as the very real Tony Kiritsis, a man who kidnapped his mortgage broker in 1977 after failing to make payment on a potentially lucrative plot of land. Van Sant imagines this tale in a way that echoes Dog Day Afternoon: an unhinged and stranger-than-fiction fable about good intentions gone wrong. It’s kind of a hoot.”

See the trailer below.