Entertainment
Did the outcome of World War II depend on the weather? Separating fact from fiction in ‘Pressure’
The success of D-day, a pivotal moment in World War II, partially hinged on the weather forecast. The Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, was planned for months as the American and British forces held practice operations in England.
Enormous efforts were made to mislead the Germans about what was coming. The operation was originally scheduled for June 5 but the day before, James Stagg, a meteorologist and group captain in the Royal Air Force, advised the American commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to wait for better conditions.
This lesser-known decision is the premise of “Pressure,” a new movie from filmmaker Anthony Maras. It’s an adaptation of David Haig’s play of the same name, in which the playwright himself portrayed Stagg. Haig, who co-wrote the “Pressure” screenplay with Maras, compares it to “The Imitation Game.”
“Some of these heroes who affect history from the sidelines just stay in the sidelines until somebody does research, discovers them lurking and finds they are so quietly heroic that it’s irresistible as a story,” Haig says, speaking via Zoom from London.
Haig began writing a version of the script shortly after the play debuted at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in May 2014. It moved to the West End in 2018, and opened in North America at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in 2023. Maras came onboard after making his 2018 film “Hotel Mumbai,” also based on a true story.
“When I first read the play and the script, I was bowled over by how, with this one decision, so many lives were changed,” Maras says, on a video call from Los Angeles. “Not just the lives of the men on the beach but throughout the Allied world. When you think of a war story, you think of men and now women on the field, but there is so much more to it behind the scenes.”
The film expands Haig’s play and includes additional characters and sequences, including the actual D-day invasion. It stars Andrew Scott as Stagg, Brendan Fraser as Eisenhower, Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s secretary Kay Summersby, Chris Messina as U.S. Air Force meteorologist Irving P. Krick and Damian Lewis as senior British army officer Bernard Montgomery.
Both Haig and Maras strove to be as historically accurate as possible, even including archival footage from the war. “It is inevitably heightened, as any stage play or film is,” Haig says. “But it is very true.”
“It is absolutely as true as we could get it within the confines of a two-hour runtime,” Maras adds. “We took great lengths to try and be as accurate to the history but also to the deeper story as possible.”
Here’s what is true and what is dramatized in “Pressure.”
The importance of the weather
Brendan Fraser, left, and Andrew Scott in the movie “Pressure.”
(Alex Bailey / Focus Features / StudioCanal)
D-day, secretly known as Operation Overlord, was timed based on several factors, including the weather, the tides and the moonlight. Because the assault was multipronged, with Allied forces coming by sea, land and air, they required good visibility at night and a high tide to ensure less distances between the boats and the defending Germans.
“There were hundreds of meters between low tide and high tide,” Maras says. “So depending on where the boats landed, you either had 50 meters until you made it to the dunes and then the bunkers, or you had to make it 300 meters if it was low tide.”
A clear forecast with low winds and no rain was essential.
“The landing craft were antiquated and flat-bottomed,” Haig says, “and if they had gone on May 5 with the storms that Stagg anticipated coming in with the jet stream, those landing craft would have capsized. The war wouldn’t have been lost, although we do posit that it might have been in the film. In reality, failure would have elongated [the war] and caused countless extra deaths.”
To shoot “Pressure,” the filmmakers used real charts and meteorological instruments. The production design team re-created the famous D-day map from the Allied headquarters in Southwark House. The real one was made in two pieces by separate manufacturers to ensure secrecy.
“When you see that map, it’s a little bit mismatched and our team re-created that,” Maras says. “We got the paper they used to draw the maps from the same mill they used for those maps 80 years ago. A lot of effort was put into the minutiae that adds to the accuracy.”
Exercise Tiger
The film opens with a depiction of an Allied training operation called Exercise Tiger, which took place over several months on England’s Slapton Sands. Because many of the soldiers were young and untested, the Allied leaders wanted to prepare them for the sights and sounds of battle.
“They did a whole series of exercises to try and get together a full-scale dress rehearsal of what D-day would be,” Maras says.
These rehearsals, still widely unknown and spanning from late 1943 through April 1944, involved dangerous friendly fire and suffered from serious coordination errors, resulting in the real-life deaths of at least 700 American and British soldiers.
“That was an absolute disaster and yet we remember D-day as one of the great military triumphs in history,” Haig says.
Maras wanted the film to begin with this moment to emphasize the headspace of the Allied leaders.
“How do you establish what the true consequences of failure are for a story like this?” Maras says. “When we’re in the war room with all of those commanders and officers, they know what the implications of their words mean because they’ve seen it. They’ve lived it. The image of the blood in the water and the young men in that water was to tattoo in the audience’s brain that if these commanders mess up, this could happen again.”
Eisenhower, in particular, felt the magnitude of D-day. “He wrote two letters on the eve of D-day: what happens in success and what happens in failure,” Maras says. “He was sleeping two hours a night. He was a nervous wreck.”
Stagg vs. Krick
In the film, Scott’s Stagg arrives at Southwark House from Dunstable four days before D-day is planned. He is confronted by the American meteorologist Krick, who disagrees with him about the potentially disastrous forecast. Krick believes sun and calm seas are on the horizon thanks to historical analogue charts, but Stagg, using more comprehensive prediction methods, thinks a major storm is coming.
“In actuality, Stagg came onboard in about November 1943 and got to Southwark House a few months earlier,” Maras says. “His transfer came a few months earlier, not a few days earlier. The contours of the relationships between Stagg and Krick and the others are accurate, but they took place in a more compressed timeline.”
Both Stagg and Krick have recounted their version of events in various books, both claiming they were right about the weather. Although Haig and Maras imagine their dialogue and how these conflicts may have played out, the conflicts were real.
“They both adhered to their own meteorological vision,” Haig says, explaining the differences in prediction models from continent to continent. “In the United States, Krick’s system of weather forecasting was viable. If you come to the U.K., you can’t rely on the weather for more than five minutes, so that method doesn’t apply.”
Adds Maras, “They thought, ‘The weather is going to be good. We should hold our nerve and go.’ There was a rhetorically violent disagreement between him and the others.”
In the film, Krick claims that he has never inaccurately predicted the weather ahead of a battle, using his successes in North Africa as evidence. This was technically true.
“He was very good at his job within the context of certain geographical landscapes,” Haig says. “He didn’t make a mistake in North Africa. When Eisenhower challenges Stagg, he says, ‘This man never got it wrong.’ And he didn’t. In the whole of the North African campaign, Krick was spot on.”
After Stagg convinces the leaders to postpone D-day, he is vindicated by a deluge of rain that arrives while everyone is attending church at Southwark House on June 5. There was a church on site, although this moment in the film was dramatized.
“Whether it began raining precisely at that moment I have my doubts,” Haig says. “But it has the framework of truth.”
Ike and Kay
Andrew Scott and Kerry Condon in the movie “Pressure.”
(Alex Bailey / Focus Features / StudioCanal)
Kay Summersby had been an ambulance driver during the Blitz. The film hints at a less-than-professional relationship between Eisenhower and his personal secretary. She was certainly with Eisenhower at Southwark House, although there is less evidence that she had any kind of association with Stagg.
“The biggest fictional thing I did with both the play and the film was to join the third point of the triangle so you’ve got Stagg, Eisenhower and Kay,” Haig says. “The link between Stagg and Kay historically would be tenuous.”
There are differing opinions about Eisenhower and Kay’s relationship. “We know that they were extremely close and they shared a trustful bond,” Maras says. “There are many photos of them together. She was definitely a big force in Ike’s life at that time, and we wanted to pay respect to that.”
“Whatever one’s interpretation of the relationships that she inhabits within the story, her influence was substantial,” Haig adds.
After seeing Peter Jackson’s 2018 World War I documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old,” Maras had the idea to use colorized archival footage in “Pressure.”
“In the D-day sequence at the end, there are various real-life shots of the soldiers landing on the beaches,” Maras says. “We were able to cut between the archival [material] and our footage to increase the scope. And it wasn’t just to get the scale. Yes, we have shots of massive flotillas and ships and trucks, but sometimes it was just for a glance of a soldier where you can see death in his eyes.”
The team ultimately acquired more than 50 hours of archival footage. They hired research editors to go through it and, after a few days, Maras asked if any of the editors could recommend additional crew to help.
Then a man named James Stagg showed up to work. “Stagg’s grandson, 80 years later, walked into our offices and helped edit the archival movie footage that we put in his grandfather’s film,” Maras says.
Stagg’s wife
Andrew Scott in the movie “Pressure.”
(Alex Bailey / Focus Features / StudioCanal)
The play doesn’t include scenes with Stagg’s wife, Elizabeth, but Haig purposefully bookends the film with the couple together. “When he arrives at Southwark House as a terse, brusque, tricky man, you’ve already experienced his level of affection with his wife and that’s really important contextually,” Haig says. “You’re waiting for the end when he goes back to see her and the baby.”
At the time when Stagg went to Southwark House, his wife was pregnant. Stagg was not allowed to make phone calls to her because of the secrecy surrounding D-day. In reality, the hospital where she gave birth was not bombed, as it is in the movie.
“The bombing of the hospital was more reflective of the times that Stagg and his wife had gone through in the lead up to D-day,” Maras says. “That element is to encapsulate that Stagg was fearing for his wife. As he walks down this corridor, he is faced with: Is she alive? Is she dead?”
Truth to power
Ultimately, Stagg tells a room full of military leaders that they have to pause on D-day because of the weather — a truthful inclusion. It was important to Maras to emphasize how he stood up to power.
“Here’s a protagonist who’s not afraid to speak his mind and has the courage to get up in front of a room full of the most powerful military on Earth at that point and tell them something they don’t want to hear,” Maras says.
“When Eisenhower was passing on the baton of leadership at the inauguration for JFK, JFK asked, ‘What gave you the edge on D-day?’ Eisenhower said, ‘We had better meteorologists than the Germans.’ He had the wisdom to trust in the experts. It’s worth heeding that lesson from history.”
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
I think it’s safe to say that horror is having a bit of a moment. Of course, horror is one of those genres that can always be counted on to be financially profitable, both because it often requires less money and because it’s so effective at tapping into the anxieties, fears, and desires of a particular cultural moment. I’ve loved almost every horror movie I’ve seen this year but, even in a year known for its strong offerings, Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus is something special. I knew going in that it was going to be one of those films that got into my mind and under my skin. I’ve been on a long and winding journey back to Christianity over the past year or so, and so the issue of faith and queerness has been much on my mind. This film crawled into my mind and my soul, latched its hooks in me, and hasn’t let me go since.
The film begins with an amorous encounter between teens Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), and at first it seems the two of them have found a connection they both clearly need. However, when Naim discovers Ryan kissing their pastor’s son, Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt) and tells the pastor what’s happened, things take a sinister turn. Ryan and Hunter undergo a terrifying encounter with a healer, who curses them to be haunted, tormented and, in Hunter’s case, killed by the thing they desire most. Unfortunately for Naim, his mother Arlena (Mia Wasikowska), soon hands him over to the healer, and it’s not long before he’s set on a terrifying course with his beloved Ryan.
Both Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen are phenomenal in this film, with each bringing something unique to the table. Bird perfectly captures Naim’s adolescent angst, as well as his sense of alienation and yearning for something more, some human connection that neither his mother nor their devout religious community can provide. He finds it unexpectedly in Clausen’s Ryan, and the two actors have palpable chemistry. And yet, all the while, Naim is also haunted by his resentment of Ryan and the fact that his own actions were what brought about their harrowing.
For his part, Clausen captures the nuances of a very complicated figure. Ryan is a rougher type than Naim, or at least it seems at first, but as the film goes on he shows a deep well of sensitivity and kindness. Like Naim, he yearns for queer connection. Clausen also superbly captures the menace and danger of Ryan’s doppelganger, even his silent movements conveying a sense of murderous menace. It’s not every actor who could play both characters with equal depth, but Clausen is more than up to the task, his wounded angelic beauty lending even his more terrifying moments an erotic charge.
Though there are moments of gore–including a disturbing moment in which we see Hunter’s head in a field–for the most part Leviticus relies on slowly spreading dread and suspense as the spectral Ryan torments and pursues Naim relentlessly any time he’s alone. Jed Kurzel’s score is also haunting and potent, with an ever-present thrumming that settles into your bones. Combined with the frequent shots of the heavily industrialized area in which these boys live–as well as the eerily intense church scenes–this score keeps us on the edge of our seats, waiting to see what new horror is going to unfold.
Indeed, there’s something particularly deeply unsettling about the premise of being tormented and, in Hunter’s case, literally killed by a demon that takes the form of your innermost desire. From a certain perverse Christian point of view this is exactly what queer desire itself is, so it makes sense that a “healer” like the one we see in this film–or, for that matter, Hunter’s family–would resort to such a desperate attempt to “save” these boys from themselves. The whole ordeal is made all the more upsetting because the being isn’t content to just torment you: as both Hunter’s death and that of the young woman who dies at the beginning of the film reveal, it wants you to suffer. Naim’s own encounter with the demon late in the film is especially disturbing, particularly once the creature tries to literally tear his throat out from the inside.
While the portions with the demon are obviously harrowing and heartbreaking, for me the most traumatic and insidious moment is the one in which Arlene admits she knew from the get-go that the “exorcism” would have terrible and lasting consequences, that Naim would have to live the rest of his life in fear. It’s a moment that’s stunning–devastating, really–for both Naim and those of us in the audience–because it reveals the extent to which Arlene’s own terror of the unknown has poisoned her relationship with her son. It’s also one of those moments that cuts to the bone precisely because it matches so neatly with so many lived experience; there are a distressing number of “Christian” parents who would rather see their children destroyed, both emotionally and physically, rather than have them be their true, God-given selves.
And yet, despite the terror and the horror and the betrayals, there are moments of genuine beauty and affection and erotic connection. The scene in which Ryan admits he wouldn’t want to be haunted by anyone other than Naim is genuinely affecting, and their shared erotic encounter on a bus is also beautifully staged. Somehow, these two young men manage to find an island of calm and love amid all the fear and dread and violence. To be sure, though, these moments are always tinged with terror. While I was watching the scene on the bus I still felt nervous, terrified lest they be discovered and unsettled by the fact that it was precisely this desire that was poised to seal both of their dooms. The film thus powerfully evokes the sinister effects of internalized homophobia, the way that a noxious religious ideology can crawl into your brain and make you fear yourself, your desires, your love, and the person who you feel the greatest connection to. In some terrible ways, the film suggests that the most damaging aspect of this haunting isn’t the violence itself; it’s the sundering of the self.
It would’ve been easy–and, for some no doubt, very satisfying–for the film to conclude with Naim and Ryan defeating their demonic tormentor and riding off into the sunset to have a happy gay life in the big city. However, Leviticus is a far cannier and subtler film than that, and it is smart enough to realize that such an ending would feel cheap and unearned and, more to the point, that it would rob the film of its essential power. By leaving the ending tinged with melancholy and ambiguity, the film suggests that our heroes will be haunted by their ordeal and that there is no easy happy ending in a world in which such homophobia is still very real and very present. (As a brief side note, it’s very satisfying to see Arlene frantically searching for Naim after he abandons her. One can but hope that the rest of her life is spent in misery as she reckons with her loneliness and her complicity in her son’s torment).
However, there is still hope in the conclusion, and it’s fitting that the last we see of Naim and Ryan is the two of them with their heads together, sharing a set of headphones. Queer life is difficult, sometimes, and there is always another hill to climb, another battle to be won. We’re led to hope, though, that these two troubled young men will manage to find their own form of peace and love and happiness, both with one another and with the queer community they’ll one day find.
Netflix on Monday announced more content for kids is coming to the streamer, with a new baking and crafting competition series inspired by popular animated show “Gabby’s Dollhouse.”
Kids programming is a key part of the Netflix‘s ecosystem, accounting for nearly 22% of all viewing on the platform last year, the company said. “Gabby’s Dollhouse,” an animated series about a young girl who goes on adventures in her dollhouse, is among Netflix’s most popular shows, ranking fourth in the second half of last year with about 108 million views.
The new competition show might benefit from its existing fan base, as its challenges are inspired by “Gabby’s Dollhouse” and features young baker duos.
“Since Gabby’s Dollhouse first premiered on Netflix in 2021, a world of creativity and imagination has exploded for our young audience and it only continues to grow,” said co-creators Jennifer Twomey and Traci Paige Johnson in a statement.
The program is part of a larger wave of kids programming coming to Netflix. Last year, Netflix struck a deal for the worldwide premiere rights to Sesame Street, after Warner Bros. Discovery said it would no longer fund production on new episodes. On Monday, Netflix said the Sesame Street collection with more than 100 episodes will be on the streaming service and next month other library programs including “Sesame Street Classics” and “My Sesame Street Friends: My Abby Season 2” will be on Netflix.
Some analysts say kids programming can be attractive to streaming services because if shows become popular, it can help retain customers. It may be more difficult for parents to say no to young children when canceling a subscription.
Other upcoming kids shows on Netflix include the third season of preschool comedy “Dr. Seuss’s Red Fish, Blue Fish” and the second season of “Sheriff Labrador,” which helps children learn safety tips, which both come out in August.
Netflix also said its podcast “Bedtime Stories with Netflix Jr.” which tells stories from worlds including “Gabby’s Dollhouse” and “Dr. Seuss” will be available for streaming on Netflix for the first time on Monday. Netflix Playground, the company’s game app, will also add more games including “My Very Hungry Caterpillar” later this year.
Visitors to Netflix House locations such as Dallas will also get to meet some of their favorite characters from kids shows, including JJ from CoComelon Lane and Elmo from Sesame Street.
The King of Horror has given his stamp of approval to Obsession, this year’s breakout hit horror movie.
Stephen King, the prolific author of best-selling horror novels including It, Carrie and The Shining, applauded the May release Tuesday in a two-line review on Threads.
“I gave OBSESSION a B+ in my movie book, but I keep thinking about it,” King, 78, wrote of YouTuber Curry Barker’s directorial feature film debut. “That weird mixture of humor and horror.”
Obsession — which follows the dangerous consequences of a hopeless romantic’s (Michael Johnston) naive wish for his crush (Inde Navarrette) to love him back — has been a massive box-office success, grossing over $297 milion worldwide off a micro-budget of approximately $750,000 to $1 million.
It has earned major plaudits from critics and a 94 percent score on the popular review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
In her four-star review, The Independent’s Clarrisse Loughrey labeled Obsession “one of the creepiest horror movies of 2026.”
The new sensation marks 26-year-old Barker’s first feature film. He previously directed the 2024 found-footage, prank-themed horror Milk & Serial, which he shot for $800 and uploaded directly to YouTube.
Obsession’s theatrical release coincided with that of fellow YouTuber Cane Parson’s directorial debut, Backrooms, a horror film adapted from his popular YouTube series about liminal spaces. The movie has similarly taken the box office by storm.
The success of both projects signals a fresh direction for the genre, leading Loughrey to declare that “the future of horror is on YouTube.”
“Gone is any feeling of Gothic tenderness, of the misunderstood going bump in the night. Here, the generation exposed to what feels like only the very worst of the world has responded in kind, with horror in which punishment is swift, nasty, and arguably well deserved,” she added. “Obsession is delicately handled work, unafraid to find pockets of humor.”
Meanwhile, King, who often shares his opinion about TV and film online, recently directed his followers’ attention to Apple TV+’s new dark comedy, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.
Starring Tatiana Maslany as Paula, a newly divorced mom who becomes convinced she witnessed a crime, the show centers on her spiral into a rabbit hole of blackmail, murder and youth soccer.
Comparing it to the streamer’s Matthew Rhys-led comedy horror series Widow’s Bay, King argued that it was “even better.”
“It’s like Hitchcock came back to do it one more time,” The Long Walk author said on X. “And Tatiana Maslany is so good. The play of emotions on her face is pretty incredible. She goes from comic to terror in an instant.”
Last September, he also revealed his list of 10 favorite films of all time, which consisted of Sorcerer (1977), Godfather 2 (1974), The Getaway (1972), Groundhog Day (1993), Casablanca (1942), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Jaws (1975), Mean Streets (1973), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Double Indemnity (1944).
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