‘Pressure Review’: The Best D-Day Film in Years

The first face that Pressure shows you belongs to a young man who is taking his final breaths in the surf at Slapton Sands. It is April 1944, and on a Devon beach, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff is rehearsing the Normandy landings when a garbled order and a flotilla of German E-boats turn the exercise into a massacre that kills 749 American servicemen. Director Anthony Maras films it fast and lets the silence do the rest, because the catastrophe is his thesis. Not heroism. Mistakes, the kind that command staffs make, and the men whose job is to keep them from happening twice.

What follows is a chamber piece: 72 hours in one map-strewn room at Southwick House, played handsomely by Mentmore Towers. Andrew Scott is phenomenal as Captain James Stagg, the Royal Air Force’s chief forecaster for Operation Overlord, a hard man — brusque, exacting, indifferent to being liked. The film never mistakes that for coldness. What commands the room is sheer competence, the authority of a man who knows exactly what he is looking at when no one else does.

About the Author

Giancarlo Sopo

Giancarlo Sopo is a writer exploring cinema, politics, and the conservative imagination.

Featured Tags

The first face that Pressure shows you belongs to a young man who is taking his final breaths in the surf at Slapton Sands. It is April 1944, and on a Devon beach, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff is rehearsing the Normandy landings when a garbled order and a flotilla of German E-boats turn the exercise into a massacre that kills 749 American servicemen. Director Anthony Maras films it fast and lets the silence do the rest, because the catastrophe is his thesis. Not heroism. Mistakes, the kind that command staffs make, and the men whose job is to keep them from happening twice.

What follows is a chamber piece: 72 hours in one map-strewn room at Southwick House, played handsomely by Mentmore Towers. Andrew Scott is phenomenal as Captain James Stagg, the Royal Air Force’s chief forecaster for Operation Overlord, a hard man — brusque, exacting, indifferent to being liked. The film never mistakes that for coldness. What commands the room is sheer competence, the authority of a man who knows exactly what he is looking at when no one else does.