I’ve just got out of seeing Pressure, and I can safely say this is a film that lives up to its name. Pressure.

For its 100-minute runtime, you genuinely feel the pot bubbling away as the story unfolds. Which is quite something when you consider we already know what actually happens. We know D-Day happened, we’ve read the historical facts and we’ve seen countless adaptations of the Normandy landings across film and television.

But Pressure comes at one of the biggest events in modern history from a completely different angle.

This isn’t about putting us straight onto the beaches. Instead, we’re with some of the people behind the decisions, those providing their expertise to the people who ultimately had to make the call. In this case, it’s the meteorologists helping to plan the D-Day landings.

Their question sounds remarkably simple: what is the weather going to do?

Except in this particular situation, thousands of real people’s lives depend on getting that answer right. And that really got me.

A different perspective on D-Day

We start in London in 1944 with Group Captain James Stagg, played by Andrew Scott, and his heavily pregnant wife Liz. I loved seeing this little glimpse of their home life before everything gets going. They’re eating a very classic eggs on toast breakfast and there’s something quite lovely and normal about it all considering where the story is about to take us. I also distinctly recall their front door window having circular windows just like my porch. Completely irrelevant to D-Day, but I noticed it, the attention to the decor. Windows aside…

It’s clear Jim has been selected for something important.

Stagg is an incredibly well-regarded meteorologist who has been brought into the planning of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy. In a nutshell, Jim needs to help determine whether the weather is safe enough for the D-Day landings to go ahead. So, no pressure then.

What I really enjoyed about Pressure is that it takes something we now think of as an established historical event and puts the uncertainty back into it. We sit there knowing D-Day happened on 6 June 1944. They didn’t know that. They were trying to work out whether this enormous operation could actually happen, with so many variables and so many lives depending upon the decisions being made.

Andrew Scott is excellent as James Stagg

I thought the performances throughout Pressure were excellent, but Andrew Scott really stood out for me as James Stagg.

The Jim we see at work differs noticeably from the Jim we meet at home. He’s very much head down, no fuss, no faff. Give him the data, give him the facts and let him do his job. He doesn’t work on hunches, and considering what’s resting on his forecast, you can completely understand why.

It portrays emotion in a way that feels distinctly 1940s. That classic ‘stiff upper lip’ is everywhere. These people are dealing with an almost incomprehensible amount of pressure, but there’s no constant emotional unravelling. Nobody is sitting around telling everyone exactly how they’re feeling. They have a job to do, so they get on with it.

But the emotion is absolutely there.

You notice it in the faces, the silences, the clipped conversations and the things that aren’t said. Scott is brilliant at this. You can see the weight Stagg is carrying, and that’s not just the planning of D-Day – there are pressures in his personal life piling on top of everything else. He keeps an almost constant poker face, never needing to explain what he’s feeling, but as the pressure builds you can see that composure being tested. Eventually some of it has to spill over, and when we do see a flash of angry verbal fire from an otherwise incredibly straight-faced Stagg, it really lands.

And that’s where the title started to mean something else to me. The pressure isn’t just about D-Day or getting a weather forecast right. It’s also about having to contain everything you’re feeling while somehow continuing to do your job.

I never expected to be so fascinated by a weather forecast

The meteorological side of Pressure is seriously interesting.

You forget how complex weather forecasting is, and then you have to remember we’re talking about the 1940s. We live in a world where everything is at our fingertips. I can pull out my phone and check the forecast in seconds, even predict the next two weeks. We have satellites, computers, enormous amounts of data and now AI capable of processing information at a speed that would have been unimaginable then.

They had to actually figure this stuff out.

It’s incredibly hands-on. Meteorologists collect observations, gather readings from various locations, communicate the information, and synthesise it to forecast the weather. And they don’t necessarily agree.

Stagg clashes with American meteorologist Colonel Irving Krick over their forecasts, and there’s a lot of paperwork, charts, sketches and debate about what all this information actually means. Normally an argument about a weather forecast isn’t exactly high drama. This weather forecast may decide whether thousands of men cross the Channel.

Suddenly every piece of paper matters.

I actually wanted more meteorology

Strangely, the thing I found most fascinating is also one of the areas where I wanted a little more from Pressure.

We see a lot of the meteorologists arguing over paperwork, readings and hand-drawn charts, but I would have loved a little more visual representation of how they actually got that information.

It might sound insignificant, but getting a weather reading in 1944 was obviously nothing like getting one today. Where were these readings physically being taken? How were they communicated? How did all these individual observations eventually become the pieces of paper sitting in front of Stagg? There was a sprinkle of that at the beginning, but after that we didn’t really dive into it again.

I think seeing a little more of that process would have helped this part of the story flourish. It didn’t need to become a full meteorology lesson – we don’t need 20 minutes explaining clouds, but considering how important this information becomes in what happened next, I wanted to understand more about the extraordinary effort involved in getting it.

It gave me a real appreciation for how much that generation had to work out for themselves. They didn’t have the technology we take completely for granted today, but they had incredible knowledge, experience and human brainpower.

I came out of a D-Day film wanting more 1940s meteorology. And honestly, I really wasn’t expecting that.

The pressure isn’t just on Stagg

Brendan Fraser plays General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the future President of the United States, and his pressure is different again. He’s one of the people who ultimately has to take all this conflicting information and make a decision.

The film also brings in the shadow of Exercise Tiger, the disastrous rehearsal for the Normandy landings at Slapton Sands just weeks before D-Day, where hundreds of American servicemen lost their lives.

That really adds to the weight Eisenhower is carrying because the possibility of something going catastrophically wrong isn’t hypothetical. Something already has.

Stagg has the pressure of being right.

Eisenhower has the pressure of deciding who to believe.

And then somebody actually has to say go…

Pressure is everywhere

This is probably what I loved most about how the story was woven together. Pressure feels like an obvious title when you first hear it, but as the film progresses it starts appearing everywhere.

There’s the pressure of planning D-Day, the pressure of predicting the weather, professional disagreements, military rank and the enormous responsibility of knowing thousands of lives are attached to these decisions. But these people also have lives outside those planning rooms. They have wives, families, relationships and their own personal pressures that don’t simply disappear because something historically significant is happening at work. I thought there was something quite poetic about how all of that was brought together.

Visually, Pressure is beautiful too. The colours, lighting and composition of certain shots really help craft the emotion. There’s a heaviness to the film that seems to grow as everything progresses, while so much of what the characters themselves are feeling remains under the surface. Again, that stiff upper lip.

My final thoughts on Pressure

The Second World War has always sat quite close to me because my Grandad was at Dunkirk. Of course, Dunkirk and D-Day were four years apart, but knowing someone in my own family lived through that war makes stories like this sit particularly heavily with me. It reminds me that behind the dates, operations and numbers we learn about were real people – somebody’s Grandad, husband, son or friend.

And that’s what I kept coming back to while watching Pressure. The men waiting to cross the Channel were real people, with families, homes and lives beyond the war. But the film also made me think about those sitting in the planning rooms. They knew all of those lives were attached to the decisions they were making.

How on earth do you carry that?!

I feel incredibly grateful for what so many people did during the Second World War, but equally I find it difficult to comprehend what people actually went through. Watching Pressure brought some of that home for me in a way I wasn’t expecting. And perhaps that’s why the film worked so well for me emotionally. We know what happened next because it’s history.

They didn’t. They didn’t know whether the forecast was right. They didn’t know exactly what the weather would do. They didn’t know whether the decisions being made in those rooms would result in success or catastrophe.

For them, D-Day wasn’t history yet… It was a decision that still had to be made.

What pressure.

*Images taken from StudioCanal Film Website*