Pressure

David Haig wrote the play Pressure in 2014 and performed in it himself, having become interested in James Stagg — the Royal Air Force meteorologist whose forecast governed the timing of the Normandy landings and who is almost entirely absent from the popular record. Anthony Maras, the Australian director of Hotel Mumbai, adapted it with Haig for Studiocanal and Working Title. It opened in the United States in May 2026 and reached British and Irish cinemas that September.

The film keeps the play's essential shape: a handful of rooms, a wall of charts, and seventy-two hours in which a decision has to be made on incomplete information. Andrew Scott plays Stagg as a stubborn, unglamorous technician; Brendan Fraser is Eisenhower, and Chris Messina the confident American forecaster who reads the Atlantic differently. Kerry Condon plays Kay Summersby, Eisenhower's driver and aide, and Damian Lewis appears as Montgomery. Maras, who also edits, keeps the camera in the room and lets the tension come from barometric readings and the sound of wind against glass rather than from the coastline.

Reviews were strong — 88% on Rotten Tomatoes across 130 critics, with Scott's performance the element most consistently singled out — and the film found a wide audience, gathering some 26,000 IMDb votes and 75,000 Letterboxd ratings within months. Maras took the Truly Moving Picture Award from Heartland Film. It belongs with the small group of British war pictures that treat the Second World War as an administrative problem before a heroic one: Darkest Hour, The Imitation Game, and Haig's own source play.