Doom and poisoned masculinity drip off the screen like sweat from the very first frame of Sean Durkin’s utterly astonishing new film The Iron Claw. Tackling the true story of wrestling dynasty the Von Erichs and their ‘family curse’, it’s a terrifying and transfixing and ultimately profoundly moving look at obsession and how a loveless father can destroy an entire family. Like Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, Durkin here uses wrestling as a springboard to something much tonally grander than you might expect, a capital-T Greek Tragedy dressed in Texas kitsch or The Passion of the Christ if Jesus did suplexes and somehow had an even more egotistical dad.
In the late ‘70s and across the ‘80s, the Von Erichs, managed by terrifying patriarch Jack (Holt McCallany), also known by his stage name Fritz, were some of the biggest names in American wrestling, absolute megastars in their home state of Texas and known all across the world to wrestling fans from the US to Japan. Yet, unlike the likes of, say, Ric Flair or Hulk Hogan, their cultural cachet hasn’t carried into the 21st Century, thanks in no small part to just how miserably their story ended.
Of the four brothers that made up the Von Erich team, only one is still alive today. This is Kevin (Zac Efron), the eldest of the quartet, though not the oldest son of Jack, with Kevin’s older brother Jack Jr dying when he was just 6 in a freak accident – the first incidence of the supposed ‘curse’. Though we do also spend a lot of time with Jack and younger brothers Kerry (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) and David (Harris Dickinson), it’s through Kevin’s eyes that we mostly see this story, and Efron rises to the challenge with by far the best performance of his career.
Bulked up hugely to capture the absurd physiques of wrestling, everything in Efron’s performance just screams pain, from the fact that his rippling muscles, instead of being impressive or sexy, simply look like they just hurt to live within to his desperate desire to keep his younger brothers safe, knowing that his dad doesn’t care enough to do so. The characters of The Iron Claw are separated mostly by how capable they are of unconditional love, and Kevin, sometimes despite himself, is the champ of this, which both cripples him with tragic grief but also eventually saves him from his own bloodline. It’s the sort of prestige star performance that I wasn’t sure Efron really had in him, but I’m oh so glad to have been proved this completely wrong.
Durkin creates such an atmosphere of dread around the Von Erich house, shot compositions often outright eerie and avoiding easy catharsis whenever possible, while the wrestling matches carry a mythic weight. It’s a deeply oppressive film for the most part, the dread of it all seeping into your blood while you watch, which makes the brief moments of light that much more affecting, whether it’s in Kevin’s relationship with fan-turned-girlfriend-turned-wife Pam (Lily James) or in the moments of fun and joy when the brothers get to hang out away from Jack.
Efron, White, and Dickinson share a brilliant brotherly chemistry both at home and in the ring – a scene in which they help their youngest and least sporty brother Mike (Stanley Simons) sneak out of the house to play a gig with his band is just delightful. Their performances, as well as Durkin’s superb and insightful writing, are incredible in the way they each find different ways to express the manner in which Jack has ruined them with his cold ambition and divide-and-rule approach to parenting – McCallany, for his part, gives a perfect display as a seething and cruel, but ultimately impotent, villain.
Though the constant cycles of death, misery, and injury do certainly suggest a ‘curse’, Durkin has no truck with any such metaphysical nonsense (though he does, late on, conjure an absolutely beautiful vision of the afterlife that is going to sit with me for a very long time). He instead posits that, beyond just Jack’s inability to be a real father, the Von Erichs were men born in the wrong time, clearly all struggling with a genetic predisposition to mental health crises in an era, and place, where expressing those struggles was impossible, creating a repression that inevitably turns toxic.
Inevitable tragedy can be a hard thing to actually make dramatically compelling outside of the obvious pre-disaster tension, but Durkin’s empathy for this family shines through here – every misery is not just shocking, but earnestly, tearfully sad. It’s this that allows the grandeur of his style and admittedly rather obvious soundtrack choices to really hit home, as well as earning him a final scene that could easily have dipped into cheesiness but instead matches All of Us Strangers and Oppenheimer as one of the most viscerally affecting endings of the year and reaffirming Efron’s performance as one of the great star turns of 2023.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 