Pressure

What if the Allies’ war-winning weapon wasn’t cracking the Enigma code à la The Imitation Game or planting fake plans on a corpse and floating it in the general direction of the Nazis, as per Operation Mincemeat? What if, actually, it was being weirdly obsessive about the weather?

The latest – and best – in the recent movie canon of hitherto-unsung British war heroes suggests that our national pastime really paid off in the days leading up to Operation Overlord – the invasion of occupied France – in June 1944. In the stalwart figure of Andrew Scott’s meteorologist Capt. James Stagg, one brave, forward-thinking man helped avert catastrophe in World War II.

Expanded from David Haig’s 2018 stage play, Pressure does what the dual-meaning title suggests and asks you to ride shotgun with the taciturn weatherman as he enters the Allies’ country house HQ for what must surely be the most stressful 78 hours in any human’s working life. General Eisenhower (a burly Brendan Fraser) and his bigwigs have their eyes fixed on June 5 to send hundreds of thousands of men across the Channel. Stagg, however, is convinced that a pair of unseen storms is heading across the Atlantic and will wash them all away. Postponing could mean fatally losing the element of surprise.

Scott is magnetic, drawing icy charisma from an introvert who is as implacable as a weather front. Chris Messina, as his bullish American counterpart Irving Krick, plays it like a nightclub impresario, a smooth political operator who has been Eisenhower’s trusted weatherman ‘since North Africa’. But, of course, Tobruk and Torquay are very different kettles of Michael Fish. ‘This is northern Europe,’ sighs Stagg. ‘The weather is different here.’

Pressure does what the dual-meaning title suggests 

The pair’s anti-chemistry is a fulcrum around which the film initially revolves: the new recruit trespassing on the insider’s turf; mutual respect curdling into resentment. Krick’s use of historic weather data to show that the storms will blow out – because they did in 1925 – seems nuts through a modern lens but the high command was from the looking-out-the-window school of weather prediction. The joy of Pressure is watching the data-led and modern-feeling Stagg trying to disguise his contempt long enough to influence the decision – often badly.

There are outsized performances galore, not all of them convincing. Damian Lewis is a lisping, ludicrous Field Marshall Montgomery, who’d sooner float his men across the Channel on a lilo than postpone the plan. Fraser, too, goes bigger than the real Eisenhower. F1’s Kerry Condon brings some much-needed emollience as the general’s canny assistant Kay Summersby. In total, though, it’s an intimidating ensemble: Scott’s weatherman enters these tightly-packed, smoke-filled rooms like Bilbo entering Smaug’s lair. 

Aussie director Anthony Maras (Hotel Mumbai) raises the millibars further as decision time draws closer, eventually blowing the budget on swapping the claustrophobia of the country house for the bloody sands of Normandy. But Pressure is less of a traditional war flick than a satisfying chamber piece about how people use and communicate information when the stakes are sky high and groupthink is kicking in. Your dad already has his ticket booked. 

In US theaters May 29. Out in the UK and Ireland Sep 9.