Movie review: Pressure

All quiet on the cold front:
​Pressure (2026, directed by Anthony Maras, now streaming)
Review by Paul Oswell
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The British weather, for centuries a staple of everyday smalltalk on that fair isle (and I grew up there, so I know of which I speak), now takes to an unlikely center stage as the harbinger of high wartime tension in this film portraying real life events. 

It’s 61 hours before D-Day, one of the Allies’ most important attacks against the German occupation of France. The outcome of the war is still very much in the balance, and everything must go as perfectly as possible. Pressure. American forces have joined the Brits at a secret countryside compound to plan a manoeuvre that requires the utmost secrecy and - since it requires coordinating a huge number of air, sea and land units - as much information about the weather as possible, including barometric…pressure. 

Andrew Scott (Fleabag, All of Us Strangers) is an air force meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg, who is called away from leave and his pregnant wife to provide rapid and accurate weather predictions to America’s General Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) and Britain’s General Montgomery (Damian Lewis). 

He arrives to find Eisenhower a bellowing blowhard, and Montgomery a sarcastic toff. All they want is to hear a good weather prediction for their preferred date, and with the Germans on high alert, the clock is very much ticking. To make matters worse, Eisenhower has brought his own guy, Irving Krick, played as the brashest Italian-American weather expert imaginable by Chris Messina. Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon) is Eisenhower’s assistant and is Stagg's only real support as she diplomatically triangulates the clashing egos. 

The generals and Krick want to go ASAP. Stagg foresees storms on the horizon and advises delaying. None of them believe him as it’s currently sunny outside, and his detractors seem unable to imagine any weather that’s not right in front of them. They want locked-in assurances, but Stagg can’t give them. Cue a series of heated debates and montages of nerdy scientists making weather charts. It’s sadly not the most visually intriguing activity as it mostly involves writing tiny numerical figures and lines on big maps. The music swells. People roar at each other about cold fronts. But what’s that building up in the background? That’s right. The pressure.

A typical scene has Fraser barging into a room and hollering at the top of his voice (every line from him is delivered at a volume loud enough to scare the neighborhood cats) about how sunny it is and why can’t he launch his bombs from the clear skies? Then Messina calls Scott a limp-wristed buffoon with no balls and Scott slowly becomes more and more indignant. 

These are the kinds of things that the cast shout in a very melodramatic manner: 

“The fate of the war hinges on this! There's only one imponderable left! I need a forecast!”

“This is the English Channel, gentlemen, I can’t guarantee anything!” 

“Get me the upper atmospheric readings from Dunstable!” 

The most dramatized light shower in history moves things along, and the deadlock is broken (no spoilers about who won the war, just in case you haven’t caught up yet). 

I understand that it’s a serious subject - there were huge casualties on both sides and I don’t want to trivialize the unimaginable sacrifices made that day. It’s also not an uninteresting story on paper; the weather really did play a huge part in the planning, and Eisenhower regularly talked about the value of the Allies’ superior meteorologists in the aftermath. 

It’s just very challenging to translate very dry, academic work into a cinematic drama, and some of the more esoteric problems verge on sounding silly when grown men are yelling them into each other’s faces. Maybe a film to half watch on a rainy afternoon. I’m not sure when that would be, you’d have to check the forecast. 

Pressure is currently streaming.
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