Actors slimming down or bulking up for movie roles is nothing new — from Robert De Niro's famous weight gain to play an aging boxing champ in Raging Bull to Christian Bale's dramatic body changes in, well, practically everything he does.
Even so, there's something remarkable — if not a little disconcerting — about Zac Efron's physical transformation for The Iron Claw, a dark sports drama that sees the former High School Musical star re-sculpted as a tragedy-stricken professional wrestler.
With his rippling, vein-streaked biceps, volcanic traps and a jawline you could plan a city around, Efron less resembles a Disney heartthrob than the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Pumping Iron — all greased up, and ready to rumble.
There's beefcake a-plenty in American director Sean Durkin's new film, which is based on the real-life triumph — and stranger-than-fiction tragedy — of the Von Erich family, a Southern dynasty of professional wrestlers that spans three generations, from the 1960s to the present day.
Efron plays Kevin Von Erich, the eldest of four brothers and the Texas heavyweight wrestling champion in the pre-Wrestlemania era of 1979, when the sport's regional charm had yet to be eclipsed by the spectacle of superheroes in spandex.
His brother Kerry — The Bear's Jeremy Allen White, buffed to Calvin Klein-ad perfection — is training to compete at discus in the upcoming summer Olympics, while David Von Erich (Triangle of Sadness star Harris Dickinson) is about to make his wrestling debut. Youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) is the lone sports holdout, preferring to mess around with his teenage rock'n'roll band.
It's all tanned torsos, Prince Valiant haircuts and pick-up trucks, bathed in a golden summer glow and set to a soundtrack of Tom Petty, Rush and Blue Öyster Cult.
Yet behind the good-time bro-downs lurks the shadow of family patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Mindhunter's Holt McCallany), a former heel whose signature move — a crab-like death-blow administered to an opponent's skull — gives the movie its title.
Fritz is determined to mould all of his sons into wrestling champs at whatever cost, hoping to capture the glory he feels eluded him as a young man.
With Kerry's Olympic chances dashed by the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow games, he soon joins Kevin and David in the ring, and the brothers become a formidable wrestling team.
But as the brothers' success skyrockets in the 80s, so too does the pile-up of family tragedy: freak illnesses, injuries and, invariably, death.
This chain of events would become known as the "Von Erich curse", supposedly the result of Fritz taking on his mother's maiden name as a professional alias to play 'Nazi' villains in the ring. The brothers — especially Kevin — seem to believe in and fear it. Does superstition invite calamity?
Writer-director Durkin's examination of families as sites of psychic menace has been a recurring obsession across his films, from his 2011 debut Martha Marcy May Marlene — in which a young woman is taken in by a cult — to 2020's chilly and riveting The Nest, with its yuppie American family falling under the supernatural spell of a decaying English manor.
In The Iron Claw, the Von Erichs are made to seem like their very own cult.
The brothers are forged by the iron will of Fritz — a model of immovable masculinity — and their sternly religious mother Doris, played by Maura Tierney in a quietly shattering turn that might be the movie's best. (On his first date with eventual wife Pam, played by Lily James, the 20-something Kevin is so emotionally under-nourished that he barely seems capable of talking to a woman.)
Durkin turns on the dread in the film's second half, creeping in on his actors with his beloved slow zooms and ratcheting up the ominous sound design.
Not that there isn't plenty of dynamic wrestling action. The close-combat camera work, by cinematographer Mátyás Erdély (The Nest; Son of Saul), expertly ducks and weaves through the bouts, energised by the kind of cheesy pomp and showmanship audiences have come to love in the sport.
But the prevailing mood is sombre: The film gradually narrows in its dramatic focus, driving the movie's theme home like a suplex: daddy's drive for success — and his inability to connect emotionally — screwed these kids up, damning them to karmic fate.
The 'bad dad' angle occasionally feels a little trite, and it risks hobbling the film's emotional nuance.
The string of misfortune that befalls the family, would be dramatically monotonous — even comical — if it weren't true.
Durkin actually pulled back on the real-life misfortune, fearing the film couldn't withstand another death.
The side effect of such repetition, however true to fact, is that the storytelling can feel schematic to the point of numbness.
That said, this is a stylistically rich and rewarding film, worth seeing not just for wrestling fans, but for anyone with a taste for the dark underside of American pop spectacle — the cracked mirror image of the era's flashy, megawatt spandex stardom.
And there's something uncanny, even heartbreaking, about the sight of Efron's one-time baby face set atop this mountain of flesh, grimly pursuing a success haunted by death — a former teen star forever doomed to escaping the pin-up image frozen in their audience's memory.
The Iron Claw is in cinemas now.