Our cinema has been taken hostage, it seems, by hostage movies and kidnapping dramas. But not the kind where Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson must rush in and save the day. This most recent spate of films leaves genre theatrics behind and instead uses the power dynamics of captivity as a jumping-off point for other conversations. Last year’s Venice Film Festival premiered Yorgos Lanthimos’s demented sci-fi-adjacent drama Bugonia and Gus Van Sant’s crime thriller Dead Man’s Wire, while at the same time the Toronto International Film Festival was premiering Romain Gavras’s comic-epic Sacrifice. Earlier in 2025, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. All these pictures share a premise that involves the downtrodden grabbing ahold of someone with great power — an always-compelling concept, but perhaps there’s a reason they have flourished at this particular moment.
We all know at this point that the internet and social media have failed to deliver on their promises of transparency and collapsed distance. (You can tweet at Elon Musk all you want; that’s not going to stop him from trying to destroy the world.) So the image of the everyday victimized finally getting a chance to confront the supposedly untouchable masters of the universe provides a present-tense thrill that is undeniably powerful.
The films themselves are quite different in tone, and none fit into easy genres. But they do share one key psychological element, which is that the audience initially accepts that the person doing the kidnapping might be not entirely sane. In Bugonia, Jesse Plemons plays a conspiracy theorist convinced that Emma Stone’s pharma exec is a member of an alien race sent here to experiment on humans; he’s a classic did-my-own-research guy, having marinated himself in YouTube videos and the trenches of the dark web. Dead Man’s Wire tells the true story of an unhinged wannabe Indianapolis businessman, Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), who in 1977 kidnapped his broker, Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery), and held him hostage at home, hoping to extract a few million dollars and an apology from the brokerage company for screwing him out of a promising land deal.
The activists of Sacrifice are far more organized and effective — but they do have a glazed-eye determination that suggests all is not right with them mentally either. This group of heavily armed, highly coordinated eco-warriors led by Anya Taylor-Joy’s Joan invades a glitzy environmental gala and grabs three people (among them Chris Evans’s narcissistic, semi-canceled movie star, Mike Tyler). They intend to sacrifice these three prisoners into a raging volcano in order to keep the Earth from being obliterated.
It Was Just an Accident, meanwhile, is set in motion when Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), an anxious auto mechanic who endured torture in an Iranian prison, starts to suspect that he has found his former tormentor and grabs the man, whom we know as Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi), off the street; desperate to confirm that he’s got the right person, Vahid reaches out to several fellow detainees, each of whom has their own ideas about how to proceed with their captive. But because none of them actually saw the face of their former captor, there is gathering doubt as to whether Rashid is that man; indeed, the only person who seems thoroughly convinced they have the right guy also happens to be the most unbalanced of the group. These improbable captors are an average, often unreliable bunch, at least at first. And Panahi derives an almost nausea-inducing tension by playing on our doubts throughout the film.
Each of these stories strikes some very contemporary nerves — conspiracy theorists, political justice, runaway capitalism, climate change — though their origins are not all rooted in the present. Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Dead Man’s Wire is based on an incident that occurred nearly five decades ago, and It Was Just an Accident loosely began life 15 years ago as an adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 play Death and the Maiden (previously filmed by Roman Polanski in 1994). Of this batch, Sacrifice is the only one that’s a totally new story, written by Gavras and Pulitzer Prize winner Will Arbery, but it might also be the most timeless of the bunch, taking place as it does across a surreal, volcanic Greek landscape. Amid the nods to social media and cancel culture and the shallow perils of modern celebrity, the image of Taylor-Joy’s disciplined group of insurgents, who speak in almost archaic, poetic dialogue, strikes a bracing contrast.
These similarities are on some level coincidental, with each of these filmmakers working in their own styles — be it Lanthimos’s jagged, atonal cadences; Van Sant’s hectic period grit; Gavras’s epic aggression; or Panahi’s matter-of-fact humanism. Even so, all these films become dialogues about power. In Bugonia, we watch Stone’s character go from bossy confidence, spouting corporate platitudes, to bewildered desperation, to calculated resignation, all in an effort to get through to Plemons’s seemingly impermeable conscience. As the movie proceeds, we also catch glimpses of the events that led him to this point and learn about the casual mistreatment of his mother by Stone’s pharmaceutical company. It is precisely because he no longer has anything left to lose that he seems so unmoved by all her different protestations. She, on the other hand, still has everything to lose; though, once she too runs out of options, the picture takes one last wild turn.
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Dead Man’s Wire demonstrates the ultimate powerlessness of both captor and captive. Tony is a failed capitalist, who bought into the idea of business as progress, only to find himself crushed by a larger corporation. Dick might be a hot shot at the brokerage, but it’s his dad’s company, and he’s beholden to the old man. When the police arrange for a call with the father (played with chilling dismissiveness by Al Pacino), we realize that the dad isn’t really willing to lift a finger to help save his son. Both Tony and Dick are helpless children of the American Dream — one borne of the system, the other the boss’s literal son, each at the mercy of forces far greater than himself. The hostage standoff ultimately reduces both men into victims, revealing where power really lies.
In Sacrifice, Evans’s movie star is a ball of anxiety, worried constantly about his public image, which he appears to have blown up a couple of times already. Isolated from the world by his celebrity, Mike only ever seems to interact with it through his phone; he exists in a kind of half-life, neither here nor there, so it’s hard for him to take anything seriously. (Somewhat hilariously, he winds up as one of the eco-warriors’ hostages by mistake.) Over the course of the film, however, he starts to believe in Joan and her kooky ideas about saving the Earth from rapidly approaching destruction. Among other things, the journey she takes him on, though crazy, is a real voyage through nature — a far cry from the mediated existence of social media and celebrity. Tonally, Sacrifice plays at times like a cross between Succession and Apocalypse Now. Mike begins to struggle with the idea of doing something that might finally give his life (and his death) meaning, and although the film goes in absurd directions, Gavras sells it by pitching everything at the level of epic satire, his grandiose images working in tandem with moments of broad humor. If in Bugonia power bounces back and forth between the two protagonists, and in Dead Man’s Wire it is revealed to exist in another person entirely, in Sacrifice it feels like an elemental force, expressed not through character interactions but through the film’s sweeping images and hard-charging music; we can easily imagine the gods looking down on these people and laughing.
It Was Just an Accident, surely the most acclaimed movie of this group, is also the one most grounded in dusty reality, despite its somewhat farcical premise. As its patchwork alliance of former political prisoners engage in a debate over what to do with Rashid, each person reveals a different understanding of not just what justice entails, but also what the truth actually is. You could map these character dynamics onto any number of current debates about guilt, presumed innocence, public judgment, social justice, and mercy — which might be one reason why both audiences and critics have embraced Panahi’s film. None of the characters in It Was Just an Accident could be said to have any real power, because none of them has any control over reality. The mismatched band of captors can’t agree on anything, and thus cannot act; their captive, bound and sedated and locked in a crate, is a nonentity for much of the movie. When someone finally seems to have anything resembling power, it is only at the screaming conclusion of the film, when one of the captors forces Rashid to accept her version of events. To some, this might feel like a perplexing, even anti-climactic finale, but experienced onscreen, it carries an undeniably cathartic charge. It might be the smallest of victories — a shared vision of truth — and yet in the world of the movie (and maybe even in our world today) it feels like a massive accomplishment.
In that sense, It Was Just an Accident crystallizes an idea that all of these films approach in roundabout ways. In our day and age, the question of power is really one of who gets to define the truth. Is Rashid a monstrous dungeon master? Was Tony Kiritsis really screwed out of a legitimate business deal? Can we save our planet by throwing Chris Evans into a volcano? Is Emma Stone an alien? All joking aside, the true hostage in all these movies is reality itself. Because we live in an age when everybody seems to live in their own world, the only way to achieve any kind of power, these films suggest, begins by confronting one another and agreeing on just what the truth is.
