Film Review: Pressure Tells A Story Of Heroism In The Lead Up To D-Day

★★★★☆

T.S. Eliot once wrote, ‘it ends as it began, not with a bang but a whimper.’ The film Pressure does so as well, opening on the catastrophe of Operation Tiger, the full dress rehearsal in the weeks leading up to the now famous D-Day, Normandy Landings in 1944.

Expanded from David Haig’s critically acclaimed 2018 stage play, Pressure is the perfect title and metaphor for this film. Pressure is rising from all sides, from the mounting pressure of the largest naval invasion in history; the storm fronts that may or may not be menacing the Normandy coast; the pressure between the Allied High Command; and the pressures rising at home during the war.

Meteorology is not the usual fare for a film set in the 78-hour build-up to the Normandy Landings. This is not a film about battles and heroes surmounting impossible odds to save a bridge or a village from an encroaching army. This is a film about nuance, about ethics, about strength of character, about speaking truth to power.

Brendan Fraser plays General Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, a bullish, desperate and frustrated general who needs to land hundreds of thousands of men and equipment, with thousands of ships and aircraft to protect the landing vehicles.

Fraser’s portrayal is a by-the-numbers depiction of Eisenhower, yet there is a touch of inhumanity battling with the vulnerability of a man who has to give the orders for tens of thousands of men to be butchered.

The military brass has everything prepaid for June 5 as their only window to invade Normandy. The famous false-flag operations on the other side of France won’t keep the Germans fooled for long, and the 300,000-plus troops waiting to invade can’t be held off much longer.

There are factions within the Allied command trying to remove Eisenhower from his position, and there are two feuding meteorologists: the arrogant and stoic Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), who knows they need to wait, and the gung-ho, bullish, arrogant and almost cliché Col. Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina), who’s politically savvy and has been Eisenhower’s weatherman since Tobruk and North Africa. He’s pressing to launch on June 5. The longer they delay, the faster they will lose the element of surprise.

Stagg is the only one convinced that two unseen, uncharted storm fronts are heading across the Atlantic, and he predicts they will wash the invasion force away.

Playwright David Haig has adapted his own play into this slick stoic period drama Image supplied

This is a new perspective on both the D-Day landings and what’s become a new World War II trope: the quiet, scientific, mathematical genius seeing patterns and having an understanding in the minutiae of large events that until recently were often ignored. Think Operation Mincemeat (Ian Fleming’s career in Naval Intelligence) and The Imitation Game (Alan Turing and the breaking of the Enigma codes in Bletchley Park).

Playwright David Haig has adapted his own play into this slick, stoic period drama. Famed Australian director Anthony Maras gives the film a somewhat deceptive meandering pace. The nuance and the meandering feel create an almost claustrophobic sensation. You know the rain is coming, and you’re just waiting for it.

Scott and Fraser play their parts with a tight, stoic, controlled naturalism, which hints at the theatrical origins of the film. Messina’s Colonel Irving Krick is set up early as the foil to Stagg. Their completely opposite natures, ideas, and natural antagonism kick off immediately.

As soon as Stagg and Krick meet, Krick is in full flight with his men singing and playing the piano, bopping away to The Andrews Sisters’ Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy in the operations room of the military base.

In a cinema full of Aussies, one could sense the whole ‘bloody typical yanks’; ‘over-sexed, over-paid, over-here’. Stagg is miles away from his pregnant wife back in London and has no-time for anyone, not even Eisenhower at times.

For the most part, the characters seem real and fleshed out, all except, surprisingly, Damien Lewis’s portrayal of General ‘Monty’ Montgomery. Lewis plays him like a caricature of an English toff, almost like the late great Terry-Thomas was playing Monty.

Lewis’ Monty is so hell-bent on invading Normandy on June 5 and showing up Eisenhower that the death and failure of his own men, and indeed perhaps the destruction of the Allied cause, is preferable to Eisenhower actually succeeding.

Scott and Fraser play their parts with a tight stoic controlled naturalism Image supplied

Historically, the feuding between the US generals with themselves and the US generals with the Allied generals is the stuff of legend, but the nuance shown in the rest of the film is somewhat lost when it comes to Lewis. His over-the-top portrayal really highlights the stoicism and the understated nature of the other actors.

There are several motifs that often don’t get explored in war films, especially in World War II films. It has often been called the most romanticised and immortalised conflict in history, or even the only honourable war the West has ever fought. It’s not always the person with the loudest voice and the easiest ideas that are right. Sometimes the quietest person is actually the smartest person in the room.

Krick and Eisenhower and the brass are certain, almost dogmatically so, that June 5 will be a perfect sunny day. It’s Stagg’s uncertainty, his understanding that nature can’t be controlled or predicted, that gives him such a powerful and relatable aura.

Kerry Condon plays Ike’s real-life private secretary, Lieutenant Kay Summersby, who seems to be on screen only to provide the sensitive, emotional connection between Eisenhower and Stagg. She is the only one sympathetic to Stagg’s misery and grief. As they are prepare for D-Day, Stagg’s pregnant wife’s hospital is supposedly bombed, and they have no way of finding out whether she is dead or alive.

Stagg does not have huge moments of grief and despair; his fear and grief are silent. He is a Scotsman after all, and if a Scot is known to be anything, it is dour and stoic. The private agony he is going through, however, is more relatable because he keeps it on the inside.

One of the hardest moments to watch is when the brass are attending Sunday services, and Stagg finds himself alone, almost like a pariah, while the others are singing hymns. And so Pressure ends like it began: not with a bang, but with a whimper. It is all the more powerful because of it.

PRESSURE opens in cinemas nationally from today, Thursday 29 October 2026.

Website: https://www.pressuremovie.com.au/

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