Written and directed by Robert Budreau
Starring Noomi Rapace, Mark Strong, and Ethan Hawke
MPAA rating: R for language and brief violence
Running time: 1 hour and 32 minutes

by Ryan Smillie

In the mid-1970s, three bank robberies loomed large in the public consciousness. John Wojtowicz’s 1972 holdup of a Brooklyn bank was adapted into Sidney Lumet’s acclaimed Dog Day Afternoon. Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and subsequent participation in a bank robbery with the Symbionese Liberation Army served as inspiration for a significant subplot in 1976’s media satire Network (also directed by Lumet). Jan-Erik Olsson and Clark Olofsson’s five-day standoff with the police after taking hostage four Stockholm bank employees was never dramatized into a Lumet-directed movie. Instead, it was through this incident that the term “Stockholm syndrome” was born, the phenomenon by which hostages form a seemingly irrational bond with their captors as a means of survival. Unlike Dog Day Afternoon and Network’s relatively quick turnarounds from newspaper headlines to silver screen portrayals, the forty-five years between the original Stockholm syndrome incident and Robert Budreau’s new film, Stockholm, provide a difficult amount of baggage for Stockholm to overcome.