Pressure (2026) Review

David Haig's 2014 play put the most consequential forecast of the war on stage, and Anthony Maras, who directed Hotel Mumbai and wrote the screenplay with Haig, keeps its shape: rooms at Southwick House, weather charts and senior officers arguing over them. Andrew Scott's James Stagg reads the data as two storms heading for the Channel, Chris Messina's brash Irving Krick, working from historical patterns, insists the skies will hold, and Brendan Fraser's Eisenhower, who quietly drafts a statement in case the invasion fails, has to choose.

Scott's simmering, stubborn Stagg is the reason to see it, and the film adds a private strain, a pregnant wife in a bombed hospital. Kerry Condon as Kay Summersby and Damian Lewis as Montgomery fill out a room of strong actors, and Maras, who also edited, keeps a talky 100 minutes moving. It still feels like a filmed play, and does not seem to mind.

The drama is bought with liberties. Stagg had been running practice forecasts since late 1943, he never proposed June 18, and the film, like the play, leaves out Sverre Petterssen, the Norwegian whose forecast found the gap between the storms. Released in the United States on May 29, 2026, it scored 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 69 on Metacritic, with an A CinemaScore.