Movie Review: PRESSURE

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 29th, 2026 / 09:42 PM

PRESSURE movie poster | ©2026 Focus Features

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon, Chris Messina, Damian Lewis, Tamsin Topolski
Writers: David Haig and Anthony Maras, based on Haig’s stage play
Director: Anthony Maras
Distributor: Focus Features
Release Date: May 29, 2026

The title of PRESSURE refers to multiple aspects of the film. There’s the psychological, emotional, professional, and temporal pressure all the characters are under. Then there’s the barometric pressure governing the weather, which threatens to wreak havoc with the planned attack on Hitler’s forces in Europe in June 1944.

PRESSURE assumes that the audience knows – eighty-one-years-later spoiler alert – that the Allied forces, a coalition of many countries, represented in PRESSURE primarily by the United States and the United Kingdom, won the war against the Nazis. Moreover, the film takes into account the likelihood that most viewers will know that D-Day, when the Allies stormed the beaches of France, was the decisive turning point in the war.

So, with ultimate victory a foregone conclusion, how do filmmakers generate suspense? Well, what do we, or Allied Supreme Commander Allied Forces General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (played here by Brendan Fraser) know about meteorology? This reviewer has in common with Eisenhower that the answer for both is, “Not much.”

Someone who does know a great deal about meteorology – perhaps more than anyone else alive at the time – is U.K. Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott). Stagg reluctantly leaves the bedside of his extremely pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski) because he has been personally recommended by Winston Churchill to Eisenhower to help with planning D-Day.

Eisenhower has already been working with top American meteorologist Irving Krick (Chris Messina), whose confidence is a contrast to Stagg’s refusal to state anything as a certainty.

Krick relies on historical maps of what the weather has been like in the relevant area on that date in years past. His prediction is calm skies and smooth sailing. Stagg cares almost nothing for precedent, instead demanding constant readings from weather balloons everywhere. While he can’t be absolutely positive, Stagg believes that the beaches of Normandy will be experiencing severe storm conditions right at the time the Allies want to go ashore.

Giving their different techniques and beliefs, to say nothing of their personalities, it’s not surprising that Stagg and Krick clash. Since Eisenhower isn’t used to underlings telling him things he doesn’t want to hear, including they’re not a hundred percent sure of what they’re saying, he is taken aback and isn’t sure which of his scientists is right.

Since PRESSURE is primarily from Stagg’s point of view, we can guess he’s going to prove correct. However, even with this and our knowledge that the Allied forces weren’t all swept out to sea, director Anthony Maras and his co-writer David Haig, adapting Haig’s stage play, get us to lean forward quite a lot.

Much of the tension arises from human interaction. Fraser makes Eisenhower unexpectedly thoughtful and even vulnerable, the sort of commander we’d want in charge in a crisis. Scott puts passion and wonderment beneath Stagg’s restrained exterior. Messina is suitably brash and period-fitting as Krick.

Kerry Condon is outstanding as Captain Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s driver and close confidante who, in this telling at least, takes it upon herself to try to keep the peace among men of extremely strong opinions. Damian Lewis contributes a memorable upper-class outburst as Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

There is spectacle in PRESSURE, as the filmmakers want to, and do, viscerally imprint upon us that lives are at stake. But our experience is more of watching something intimate and meticulously observed, of what is required in the innermost being of people making world-changing decisions. It is powerful and affecting.

Follow us on Twitter at ASSIGNMENT X
Like us on Facebook at ASSIGNMENT X

Latest Buzz

A surprisingly suspenseful drama about events immediately before WWII's D-Day

Article Source: Assignment X
Article: Movie Review: PRESSURE

Related

Related Posts:

Leave a Comment

Assignment X Poll

Newsletter subscription status