Directed by Sean Durkin, The Iron Claw is a revelatory tale which portrays quite succinctly how toxic behavioural patterns are passed down from one generation to another. “There is no future in music. I chose sport and I was right”, says Fritz Von Erich, a professional wrestler and a former NWA (National Wrestling Alliance) Heavyweight Championship winner at a family dinner. Fritz wants all four of his sons to excel at wrestling and keep alive the legacy of Von Erichs as the greatest family in wrestling history.
Fritz compares his sons and ranks them in order of his most favourite to least favourite. At a seemingly normal family dinner, Fritz casually rubs in the fact that Mike (Stanley Simons), who isn’t keen on wrestling, is his least favourite. “Dad is too hard on Mike '', says Kevin (Zac Efron) seeking his mother Doris’ (Maura Tierney) intervention. She casually shrugs off Kevin’s concerns.
The Iron Claw Overview
The film shows usual interactions between Von Erichs—dinner table conversations, ringside chats, training montages—which seem ordinary on the surface but are, in reality, extremely abusive. Fritz casually kills Mike’s singing ambitions at a family lunch by refusing him the permission to play at a gig he landed after much hard work. The brothers—Mike, David, Kevin, Kerry are terrified of speaking up against their overbearing father whose suffocating, domineering presence is killing each of them bit-by-bit, quite literally.
None of this absolutely deranged behaviour comes across as problematic at first. The film is a testimony to just how sophisticated narcissistic parental abuse is—it is hiding in plain sight, and can go undetected even to an outsider. Pam (Kevin’s girlfriend, later wife, played by Lily James) seems cognizant of the dysfunction in the family but even she isn’t familiar with just how sinister the abuse really is.
The Iron Claw Plot
Owing to the tensions with Soviets, the US pulls out of the 1980 Summer Olympics which jeopardizes Kerry’s (Jeremy Allen White) career as a discus thrower. He is roped into the wrestling circuit by his father, who pits David against Kevin. Fritz not only actively burdens his kids with unrealistic expectations but also creates rifts between them.
Like a true narcissistic parent, he withholds affection and appreciation from his kids which they crave for the most. When Kevin gets up after being knocked out on the concrete floor by his opponent, instead of appreciating his grit, Fritz replaces Kevin with David (Harris Dickinson) as a worthy contender for the NWA title. David dies of steroid abuse—he cannot live up to his father’s unrealistic expectations. Kerry uses drugs and alcohol to drown his sorrows which results in a life-altering accident and an eventual suicide.
The Iron Claw Direction And Writing
Circumstances become dire when Mike is coerced by Fritz to return to the ring shortly after he recovered from a toxic-shock induced coma and suffered brain damage. It is worth nothing here that Doris is just as complicit in the abuse of these boys for she enables the patriarch’s problematic actions. Twice the Von Erich boys reach out to her—first, Kevin and then Mike—she ignores their cries for help. In her final appearance in the film, we see an act of defiance by Doris—she refuses to cook dinner for Fritz and instead sits at the kitchen table, painting. “I am not hungry”, says the mother of five who has now attended funerals of her four sons (including Jack Jr). The film plays out giving us a peek into the daily lives of a supposedly ‘cursed’ family who just ‘happens’ to go through unfortunate times.
The Iron Claw: What Works, What Doesn't
Writer-director Sean Durkin produces a sharp critique of families who think they are cursed while in reality, they are utterly dysfunctional and need psychological intervention. The ‘curse’ here isn’t as much a supernatural entity but unrealistic expectations of parents and abusive parent-child dynamics.
In a telling scene, Zac Efron refuses to let his wife Pam and his kid come into physical contact with him because he thinks it will transfer the curse to them. This is after he got ‘Von Erich’ legally dropped from his name. He then wonders at night, quite helplessly—“Why does this keep happening to us?” while the writing is on the wall. A monkey can see through the abusive patterns in the family but a critical lack of self-awareness in the brothers keeps this realization from the sons. It is a much-needed epiphany which never comes.
“We’ll be your brothers, dad”, say Kevin’s kids after we see the four Von Erich brothers embrace each other in the afterlife. Kevin has a cathartic release—tears roll down his cheeks which symbolize that he is finally breaking the generational cycle of abuse by embracing a softer, gentler masculinity. The Iron Claw is a sharp critique of toxic masculinity and a stirring portrait of the horrors of narcissistic parental abuse. As a survivor of this abuse myself, I cannot recommend this film enough.
The Iron Claw will begin streaming on Lionsgate Play June 14 onwards.
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