Bill Skarsgård’s R-Rated Thriller On Netflix Is The Platform’s Best True Crime Offering

By Robert Scucci
| Published 3 seconds ago

The most dangerous thing in the world is a desperate man who feels like he has nothing left to lose. It makes for inherently compelling cinema, especially when the desperation is played with nuance, like in 2025’s Dead Man’s Wire. Based on the real-life 1977 Tony Kiritsis hostage standoff, Dead Man’s Wire is a fictional retelling of the events depicted in the 2018 documentary Dead Man’s Line, written and directed by Alan Berry and Mark Enochs, who consulted screenwriter Austin Kolodney and director Gus Van Sant on the historical context of the nationally broadcast incident.

While I’m not here to nitpick historical inaccuracies, nor do I want to because I’m talking about the film adaptation as a piece of cinematic art, I can confidently say that Dead Man’s Wire is a shockingly immersive period piece. I didn’t stop to verify every car make and model or anything like that, but the movie takes place in 1977, and it convincingly looks like something that came out of that era. While mostly shot through conventional means, we’re also given on-the-street footage that looks like it was pulled directly from police cameras, and there’s even some real archival footage peppered throughout the film in a similar fashion to how Weezer pulled off looking like they were performing in an episode of Happy Days.

And I haven’t even gotten to the best part about Dead Man’s Wire: Bill Skarsgård as the desperate man operating in this lane, and he’s mad as hell!

Make Sure You Get The Apology In Writing

There’s a kind of wish-fulfillment arc that plays out in Dead Man’s Wire that makes it all feel so universal. Tony Kiritsis has a bone to pick with one specific person, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), who, in a botched real-estate deal, undermined the profitability of Tony’s most recent and valuable investment. Knowing he’s ruined financially if he doesn’t straighten things out, he heads over to Meridian Mortgage Company, where M.L. Hall said he’d be to exchange words, only to find out that he ducked out for vacation early and delegated the meetup to his son, Richard (Dacre Montgomery).

Furious and unable to contain himself, Tony assaults Richard and straps a loaded shotgun to his neck with a wire rig connected to a dead man’s switch. Here’s how it works: if you move enough to trigger the switch, your head will get blown clean off. With Richard and the device in tow, Tony holes up in his apartment and begins making his demands to the authorities. He also places crazed calls to his favorite radio DJ, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), hoping his story will be broadcast so the public will side with him.

As Dead Man’s Wire slow-burns through its second and third acts, we get a clear glimpse into Tony’s psychology, which, to Bill Skarsgård’s credit, is portrayed with care, nuance, and just the right amount of unpredictable explosiveness lingering beneath the surface. He knows that he’s dead to rights. Everybody saw what he did. But he refuses to buckle under pressure until he’s made whole financially and receives a sincere apology from M.L. Hall, who doesn’t want to kowtow to terrorists and is more than willing to treat his son as collateral if it means he doesn’t have to show any signs of weakness.

Something, Something, Capitalism

While it’s obvious that Dead Man’s Wire is an indictment of capitalism, it’s carefully constructed in a way that allows you to appreciate all of the gray areas. M.L. Hall is your perfect corrupt capitalist, to the point where he’s willing to gamble with his son’s life during a hostage negotiation while sipping mai tais on the beach. But it’s also reasonable to assume that he’s a smart guy who knows he’s crossed every t and dotted every i, legally speaking, and believes people like Tony are all bark and no bite.

Tony, on the other hand, is a loner facing financial ruin who initially only wanted an apology. His whole stunt was orchestrated with the intent of exposing the kind of financial impropriety that happens behind closed doors at Meridian Mortgage. Even if Hall was well within his legal rights to screw Tony over, Tony recognizes that the house always wins and questions the ethics of what happened to him. In his mind, he’s the little guy taking one for the team by hurting the company’s bottom line with bad publicity.

Everybody in Dead Man’s Wire is in the wrong, but it shows just how far a man is willing to go when he’s convinced, without a sliver of doubt, that he was swindled out of his nest egg and the institutions that are supposed to protect him have failed him. It doesn’t condone or condemn the violence, but rather examines the untethered rage that’s unfortunately, and all too frequently, the byproduct of living in a capitalist society where the working man is forever getting screwed by the institutions that run his life.

What’s most telling about this fictional retelling of Tony Kiritsis’ most unhinged moments is how the entire ordeal ultimately resolves. Mental health is brought into question, but it’s a hotly debated topic when discussing the real-life incident. It does make me wonder how unhinged Tony Kiritsis truly was before he decided to take this route. If Bill Skarsgård’s performance is any indication, it certainly feels like an otherwise reasonable man pushed to the brink by a series of personal and financial crises. It’s written all over his face when he has to mean-mug for the camera, but his true personality occasionally slips through the facade when he’s trying to lighten the mood or add some levity to an impossibly high-strung situation.

Dead Man’s Wire offers no easy answers to its unfolding story, but I don’t think it’s supposed to. Its delivery is very much, “this is what happened, as authentically as we could replicate,” forcing the viewer to arrive at their own conclusions after watching the whole thing play out. Like most Gus Van Sant films, this one lingers because it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable, as if you’ve got a dead man’s switch tied to your neck and any sudden movement could end it all.

As of this writing, Dead Man’s Wire is streaming on Netflix.