The Iron Claw

Directed by Sean Durkin

Running time: 2hr12 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Zac Efron (top) in The Iron Claw

It’s been a strange era for male bodies on screen. Where the hyper-muscled likes of Stallone and Schwarzenegger were marketed as godly alpha hulks in multiplex action fodder of the ‘80s and ‘90s, brawn has become entirely normalised of late — marble-cut, personally-trained pecs and abs such a default build for actors that they show not just in superhero movies (on actors as disparate as Chris Hemsworth and Kumail Nanjiani) but on dorky-sweet romcom leads and, anachronistically, in all manner of period pieces. (Feast your eyes on those midcentury washboard stomachs on Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in TV’s Fellow Travellers.) It might sound odd, then, to say I can’t stop thinking about Zac Efron’s vastly ripped physique in The Iron Claw, and not in a thirsty way. Bronzed and bulked-up, veins throbbing and popping from the film’s very first shot, he looks, from the neck down, like an awful lot of other contemporary leading men.

And yet there’s something moving about the meat here, something tragic about the hours of gruelling physical effort evident in that extraordinary build, all in the service of such deep, unrelenting, all-American unhappiness. The body, let it be said, is milieu-appropriate, as is the unflattering Prince Valiant hairdo atop it. Based on a true story, Durkin’s film is set in the booming, amped-up world of professional wrestling in the 1980s, just then vaulted by cable TV into whole new realm of macho cartoon theatre, with exaggerated physicality to match. Efron plays Kevin von Erich, eldest son of a would-be dynasty of wrestling warriors. His brothers Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simons) are all formed in the same He-Man mould, to varying effect; their abusive pro-wrestler father Fritz (Holt McCallany) does the moulding, with a one-size-fits-all approach that serves him poorly as a coach and worse still as a parent. The size in question, of course, is as big as humanly possible: We’re in Texas, after all.

Fritz cares little for his sons as individual personalities: their uniform goal is to grow, and swell, and win. You can probably guess that this isn’t a success story: Durkin, the shadowy stylist behind Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, is drawn to tales of families in plunging crisis, and this one goes awry on such an operatic scale that, were it not biographical, you’d think was laying it on a bit thick. (A fifth von Erich brother died in childhood, while Durkin’s script actually edits out the miserable arc of a sixth.) I expected The Iron Claw to go full American gothic in its horrific exploration of violent patriarchy and clotted, red-blooded masculinity — a mythos that curdles into an apparent curse. What Durkin gives us is more earnest, at times even more sentimental, than that. But the film is piercing on the physical trap of machismo, showing us souls in stunted conflict with bodies trained only to fight. Efron, long underrated as an actor, is terribly affecting as a man who wears his hard-gained musculature as an increasingly heavy, debilitating carapace, one he doesn’t yet dare to shake off. The Iron Claw denormalises such physicality, reminding us of its extremity, its construction and its burden.

THE IRON CLAW (2023) Written by Sean Durkin | Shot by Mátyás Erdély | Edited by Matthew Hannam