"Pressure": D-Day’s Untold Weather Story, Writer And Director Interview & Review

08 September, 2026Alex Leptos

When we think of “war movies”, we might think of films like Dunkirk or 1917- sweeping battlefields, huge military operations and the kind of cinematic scale that comes with something so massive that so naturally gives itself to action sequences and a whole lot of tension. Pressure, directed by Antony Maras and written by David Haig, takes a markedly different approach.

As the name suggests, it certainly doesn’t abandon that tension completely. Set in the days leading up to D-Day, the film follows Met Office meteorologist James Stagg as he is tasked with advising General Dwight D. Eisenhower on whether or not the weather conditions would allow the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France to go ahead. With hundreds of thousands of lives and the very fate of the war hanging in the balance, Stagg’s weather prediction helped determine when, or even if, the largest sea-borne invasion in history would happen.

On paper that sounds extremely tense, and in many ways it is, but Pressure is quite a restrained affair. And that is not necessarily a criticism. In fact, the film’s refusal to indulge in the expected spectacle of a wartime epic is one of its more interesting qualities. Pressure narrows its focus to the people rather than making the war the protagonist.

When we sat down with writer of the original play David Haig and director of the screen adaptation Anthony Maras, we asked how he approached a war movie without the expectations of a war movie. Maras said that the war was always central to the story, but he describes it as merely “the head of the octopus”, with Stagg’s story representing one of its many tentacles. Rather than attempting to tell the enormous story of D-Day itself, the film uses this small, largely overlooked part of the operation to explore decision-making, and how we make the toughest ones with consequences that are almost impossible to comprehend.

That restrained approach is not new to this story. Haig originally wrote Pressure as a play more than a decade ago, but while adapting it for the screen, it inevitably meant letting go of certain elements. Haig told us that there are many things that he had to let go of when moving from stage to film, but that he did so “very willingly.” He commented that theatre requires much larger set pieces and details that ensure an entire audience can understand what is happening from a fixed viewpoint. Film, by contrast, has a much closer focus on smaller details and more intricate characterisation. The film does, however, retain many of the details of the play whilst expanding its world.

Visually, that expansion is perhaps where Pressure is at its strongest. The film is beautifully shot, with the weather itself becoming almost another character (much like it is in every day British life!). The uncertainty of the clouds, wind and changing conditions give the film its weight and its tension- because how can you make a decision like this based on something as unpredictable as weather? Maras explained that nature was an important part of the story precisely because it is unpredictable. For all the meticulous planning behind D-Day, the Allies could not control the one thing they needed to cooperate: the weather.

That unpredictability provides Pressure with its central source of tension. The difficulty of course is that D-Day is a major historical event and audiences already know how it ultimately ends. So there is no great mystery surrounding whether the invasion ultimately happens.

Instead, the film attempts to put us in the position of the people living through those days, who had no idea what the next forecast would bring. Anthony Maras told us about while the audience knows the destination, the characters do not, and while D-Day may be familiar history, the intricacies of the operation and the decisions that led to it are less widely known. The tension therefore comes from watching those decisions being made in real time, knowing that even the smallest change in the weather could have enormous consequences.

Pressure is, for the most part, a perfectly enjoyable film. It is well acted with genuinely captivating performances by Andrew Scott and Brandon Fraiser both delivering career highlights. It’s also visually polished and built around a genuinely extraordinary true story.

However much of the film unfolds exactly as you might expect, but as we’ve established that’s not really its fault. There are few genuine surprises but a lot of it will come down to individual knowledge of the event in question.

James Stagg as a character is a deeply serious and often difficult man. He is not the obvious hero, with Maras commenting that his “superpower” was simply being exceptionally good at his job. Haig added that simply doing one’s job especially in circumstances like this can be very profound.

He may not be traditionally likeable, but there is certainly something heroic about a man willing to stand up to his superiors and trust his own expertise when the pressure is cranked up to 100. As Maras put it: “He might not have been nice but he was good.”

Haig also recognised the importance of giving Stagg moments of warmth beneath his “frosty exterior”, as he described. His interactions with his wife for example offer glimpses of the person behind the professional, giving the audience something to hold onto amid his more abrasive qualities.

It is this complexity that makes Stagg more interesting- and that’s ultimately what you want from a character. Some of the best characters aren’t necessarily “likeable”, like a Marty Supreme or a Tony Soprano. One does not need to be charming to be compelling; Stagg’s heroism comes from having the courage to be right when being wrong could cost countless lives.

Ultimately, Pressure is perhaps best appreciated not as another grand D-Day epic, but as a small story sitting inside a much larger one. Sure it’s about weather, but that’s very surface level. It’s more importantly about uncertainty, responsibility and the terrifying burden of having to make a decision when there is no guarantee that you have made the right one.

The real-life story is fascinating enough to carry much of the weight, and the performances and visuals language keep the film engaging. But it also falls short in some ways.

We do have to applaud David Haig and Anthony Maras for making talk about the weather as compelling as this. British small talk be damned.