Forty-nine years ago, an Indiana man named Tony Kiritsis devised a plan to hold the president of the Meridian Mortgage company hostage in an attempt to become, in his words, “a goddamned national hero.” It’s a story of simmering anger, righteous delusion, and deep insecurity. In other words, it’s just the kind of ripped-from-the-headlines narrative that will always be ripe for adaptation. And yet, even as I walked into a theater in the first days of 2026, I simply had no idea of what to expect from Gus Van Sant’s latest film, Dead Man’s Wire. Given the filmmaker’s past work, can you blame me?
Van Sant gets a bad rap. Or rather, he doesn’t seem to get much of a rap at all. Where names like Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, Alexander Payne, and Steven Soderbergh seem securely placed within the pantheon of his generation of independent filmmakers, Van Sant always seems on the outside looking in. And listen, I get it: His filmography is surely not without its blemishes (he’s the guy who remade Psycho, shot-for-shot, with Vince Vaughn), but how many auteurs can truly say they’ve gone from Sundance to the Oscars and back several times in their career, all without losing the eccentricities and obsessions that shaped them in the first place?
What’s perhaps most impressive about that singularity is how often it’s in service to something that could be, in the wrong hands, about as cinematic as a Wikipedia article. By my count, Dead Man’s Wire is the eleventh of Van Sant’s films to be inspired in some part by real-life events. From the druggy memoiristic doom spiral of Drugstore Cowboy, to the spare and exposed Elephant, to the more straightforward sheen of Milk, it’s clear that Van Sant is as activated by the shifting tides of real life as he is by his own personal journey. That’s not to say these obsessions aren’t without their personal touch—some may be direct rips, others jumping-off points, but none are what you might call straightforward.
Take his 1989 breakout film, the story of a wayward group of superstitious junkies always in search of the next big score. Based on the autobiographical novel by James Fogle, Drugstore Cowboy is a film of frantic robberies, high-wire escapes, and drug-fueled mania. Exciting stuff, to be sure, but what remains most notable about it is how uninterested Van Sant is in squeezing every last bit of plot from what ultimately becomes a kind of meandering hangout movie, more Dazed and Confused than Requiem for a Dream. “Gus allows things to live,” said Drugstore Cowboy star Kelly Lynch in a retrospective on the movie. “The humor, the sadness, the horror, the weird coincidences of life. Putting all those elements together is pure Gus Van Sant.” This is especially true of the film’s latter half, which mostly dispenses of the “cowboy” portion of the plot and delves deeper into the realities of a junkie gone clean. “Most people don’t know how they’re gonna feel from one moment to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles,” says Matt Dillon’s Bob in a moment of clarity toward the film’s end, getting at the psychological draw toward the drug life often ignored in favor of the physical.
Where one might expect journalists to explain and filmmakers to interpret, Van Sant seems interested in doing the opposite, aiming for strict depiction, removing things like perspective and objectivity from the equation.
Psychology is very much at the forefront of Dead Man’s Wire. On the surface, Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) is just a normal dude, working-class and largely anonymous. Until, of course, he’s not. About halfway through the film, when the hostage situation has moved from the streets of Indianapolis to Kiritsis’ explosives-rigged apartment, the authorities bring in a self-described psychological expert looking to understand what makes Kiritsis tick and, in turn, how to de-escalate. “I think he’s angry” is the refrain from almost everyone involved. This is both played for laughs and used by Van Sant as an opportunity to get at the “why” of it all. His anger is, in its way, righteous. He’s been duped by the bigwigs at the mortgage company, defrauded of his land, left in debt with no hope of getting out. His methods are brutal, sure, but as the movie progresses, we see more of the community come to his defence. It’s the ethically muddy underdog story familiar to both the movie’s late-’70s setting and to the present.
If there’s an obvious throughline to the headlines Van Sant is continuously drawn to, it almost always returns to the old adage of bleeding and leading. Nowhere is that more apparent than within his self-described “death trilogy” (well, maybe with one fairly literal exception), an early-aughts run that directly followed his most overtly Hollywood years and awoke a certain dormant depravity. We can argue about Van Sant’s place within the ’90s indie canon, but I think it’s notable how willing he was to unpack the thorniest moments of his time. You might call it hubris, but the fact that Van Sant thought it not only possible but desirable to take on a subject like Columbine, as he did with 2003’s Elephant, certainly says something about his outlook. So, too, does the way he went about it. Rather than lean into the melodrama and the horrific climax, Van Sant chose to use time, tension, space, and creeping inevitability as a way to dull the sort of catharsis that might seem cheap. No explanation, barely any plot—just long takes, a throbbing score, and the stacking of small moments. “The film is not exactly dictating what you should feel,” Van Sant told us back in 2018. “Just be a part of it. Be a part of the ideas.”
He pulls a similar trick with 2005’s Last Days, a film centered around the final days of Kurt Cobain. Perhaps even more restrained and less didactic than Elephant, Last Days avoids anything in the way of explicit commentary. “The inspiration in Elephant and Last Days was kind of the reaction to the amount of journalistic analysis of Columbine and the death of Kurt Cobain,” said Van Sant during a recent Reddit AMA. It seems these films were a way for Van Sant to turn the cinematic instinct inside out. Where one might expect journalists to explain and filmmakers to interpret, he seems interested in doing the opposite, aiming for strict depiction, removing things like perspective and objectivity from the equation. The results—as with the first film in the trilogy, Gerry—are the least accessible films in his entire filmography, and yet perhaps the most important for understanding just what makes Van Sant tick.
Similarly, the most effective moments of Dead Man’s Wire are a look at not just how events unfold in real time, but how we interpret and explain them within the collective consciousness. From the moment Kiritsis leaves the downtown building with his hostage, the entire Indianapolis media apparatus is hot on the case, posting up outside his home with dozens of cameras. Van Sant chooses to not only recreate the old film stock of the ’70s, but directly intersperses the film with some of the original news coverage as well, creating something that flirts with documentary-style filmmaking. There’s a distinct bit of voyeurism playing out here, a way for the world outside of Kiritsis’ cramped apartment to co-opt his message and be both horrified and a little titillated by his methods. In a clever bit of card-showing, Van Sant goes as far as to have the national broadcast cut from a tribute to America’s favorite gun-toting hero John Wayne to the manic press conference Kiritsis demands as a condition of his surrender. Who’s the real hero here, and who decides?
“It’s important for today’s audiences to understand that the narratives surrounding historical events are just as influential as the events themselves,” said Van Sant in a recent interview. He’s right. Van Sant has chosen many modes of storytelling over the course of his career, but whether it’s a sideways depiction of one of the ugliest moments in modern American history, low-level criminals puttering around the Pacific Northwest, or a DIY hostage crisis in Middle America, he’s always the one telling them. And if history has taught us anything, we can never be sure of how it will play out. FL
