With its 1980s neon fonts, strangely sanitised storytelling, expositionary dialogue, wrongly aged cast and terrible wigs, The Iron Claw looks and feels like a prestreaming TV movie – and not just any old TV movie but a strangely entertaining, darkly tragic, completely gripping TV movie.
Even excising several relevant family members from the narrative, Sean Durkin, the intriguing film-maker behind Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, can’t impose a conventional movie shape on the wild true story of the wrestling world’s Von Erich brothers.
There’s a tale-spinning “and then” quality to The Iron Claw’s storytelling – typically “and then ... something even worse happens”.
In character and performance, the Mindhunter actor Holt McCallany towers over the picture as the formidable wrestling patriarch Fritz Von Erich, the sire of several grappling sons, all of whom are ranked in order of sporting prowess. The track star Kerry Von Erich (Jeremy Allen White) is in pole position until the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Olympics pushes him back into the ring with the rest of his siblings.
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Kevin (Zac Efron), the oldest brother, is doggedly determined to fulfil his father’s wish to bring home a world-title belt, but he is usurped by the younger, charismatic David (Harris Dickinson).
In time, even the sensitive, musically inclined Michael Von Erich (Stanley Simons) is reluctantly absorbed into the family business. Unhappily, they need the numbers. One by one, the Von Erichs fall victim to a family curse, apparently oblivious to the corrosive masculinity and parental pressure of their home life.
The brothers bizarrely never discuss their toxic father and refrigerator mother. As their respective fates are played out, it leaves one waiting for a reveal or showdown that never comes. Efron’s character makes for a passive, unwitting protagonist, in an oddly compelling study of Hamletian inaction with none of the rumination. Lily James, playing his wife, is given scandalously little to work with, but the grander ensemble bring plenty of acting (and literal) muscle.
The Iron Claw opens in cinemas on Friday, February 9th
