Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mayday
2026 · Jonathan Goldstein · Mayday on Sightlines
An American spy plane comes down over the Soviet Union in 1987, and the pilot lands in a snowy backyard. The man who owns the yard is ex-KGB, gruff and suspicious. He also loves American culture. That landing is the whole film in one image. Troy Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) has fallen into the one patch of enemy ground where the enemy already speaks his language, and Moscow, with the U.S. Embassy waiting at the far end, is a long cold run away.
Most of the films that Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, wrote about in his two books on cinema are hard films. Mayday is not one of them. It is a cheerful, expensive, well-built action-comedy, and that is exactly why his first book is useful here. Deleuze said classical cinema runs on what he called the action-image: a character sizes up a situation, acts on it, and the action changes the situation. He called the clearest version of this the large form. A whole situation presses on the hero until he does something decisive and the world shifts. Mayday is about as pure an example of the large form as you will find in 2026. A man is behind enemy lines, there is a place where he will be safe, and the picture is the distance between the two. Every scene is a step down that road.
Deleuze also gave a name to the setting that surrounds the hero and calls action out of him: the encompasser. Here it is the Soviet Union, and the way the film builds it matters. Budapest plays Moscow. Its surviving socialist-era buildings provide the official look, and Heroes' Square is dressed as Red Square. Against that gray backdrop the film scatters 1987 Americana: Springsteen, McDonald's, Top Gun. Ustinov wants all of it, in a country that bans it. The setting isn't just there to be crossed. It contains its own contraband.
That contraband touches another of Deleuze's ideas. He called the mark an object that means something because of the habit attached to it: you see X and you expect Y. Van Halen's "Jump" means the eighties. A Top Gun reference means a cocky pilot. The A.V. Club found these cues heavy-handed, period signposting doing work that texture should do, and that complaint is fair. But look at who holds the marks. The American carries them without thinking. The Russian has collected them and cherishes them. Goldstein and Daley's real invention is putting the clichés in Ustinov's hands, so his fluency in the enemy's pop culture is the running joke and his accent never is. That choice turns down a whole line of ancestors.
Here is that line. In Hell in the Pacific (1968), John Boorman kept two enemies on an island with no shared language. Conrad Hall's camera held them at opposite edges of one deep frame, and since nobody translated Toshiro Mifune's Japanese, the blocking had to carry every negotiation. In Enemy Mine (1985), the alliance turns on a language being built on screen, one word at a time. The Defiant Ones (1958) chained its two men together, so neither could leave a shot or make a decision alone. Mayday inherits the yoke but skips the language problem. Deleuze's term for force set against force, man against man or man against milieu, is the binomial. Here the binomial is softened from the start, because the stranger already knows your songs.
The rhythm comes from two American films. In 48 Hrs. (1982), Walter Hill cut insult volleys at thriller tempo so that antagonism carried plot. In Red Heat (1988), he settled the polarity of the American/Soviet pairing: the Russian's procedure is shot straight and the American's reaction gets the laugh. Branagh's Ustinov keeps the competence of that tradition but plays it broad and loose. Critics found him the film's center of gravity, funnier than he has been in years. Then there is Midnight Run (1988), which Daley names as the structural model. Its road engine lets comic scenes run at their own length between set pieces. That matters because comedy and action keep different clocks. A joke wants the shot held past comfort. An action scene wants clear geography. The road gives each its own stretch.
The most interesting thing in Mayday is its camera. Barry Peterson, who also shot Game Night and Honor Among Thieves, uses an impossible traveling shot that passes through walls, over ceilings and flips over itself, carrying the action through several rooms before an explosion lands. Deleuze called a moving shot a mobile section, a cut through time that expresses a change in the whole. Here the whole is the chase, and the camera's job is to keep it in one piece, so you always know where everyone is in the building. It's a classical aim pursued with a camera no human could carry. The A.V. Club admired these runs and found them uncannily fake in the same review. Both reactions are right.
This is where the older film theory comes in. André Bazin argued that photography's power lies in the real having actually been in front of the lens. Goldstein's rule for the aerial work answers him directly: everything the pilots are seen doing, real planes did. Real fighters were flown over the south of France and then digitally re-skinned as period aircraft. The movement is real and the surface is invented. WETA's effects gave the flying a weightlessness that even The A.V. Club admired. In other scenes the digital camera goes where no camera could. The film's craft argument is about where Bazin's contract stops holding, and the film draws that line in a different place from scene to scene.
What did Mayday do to film? It didn't break the action-image. It kept it alive in a place where it was supposed to be dying. The original, mid-budget, star-driven comedy had nearly vanished from cinemas, and this one went straight to Apple TV+, where it became the platform's most-watched original movie. One critic said it deserved a theatrical run it never got. So here is the question to take into a rewatch. When a sensory-motor machine this old runs this smoothly, on a television, with a camera that walks through walls, is the craft holding the old form together or quietly pushing it somewhere new? Watch the long shots through the building. Track where your eye knows it is. Then watch Branagh's face whenever an American song comes on.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — A downed pilot behind enemy lines must cross the long cold run from a provincial backyard to the U.S. Embassy gates in Moscow; every scene is a step from danger to safety.
- the encompasser — Budapest's surviving socialist-era fabric stands in for the USSR, with Heroes' Square dressed as Red Square: the hostile milieu that drives the action.
- mark — Springsteen, McDonald's, Top Gun and Van Halen's 'Jump' work as 1987 period signposts (called heavy-handed by The A.V. Club), placed in the hands of the Americanophile Ustinov.
- binomial — Two men from opposite sides of a hostile border, an American pilot and an ex-KGB agent, forced into alliance with pursuers behind them; the opposition is softened because Ustinov already knows American culture.
- the mobile section — Peterson's impossible travelling shot passes through walls and over ceilings and flips over itself, carrying the action across several rooms in one continuous movement before an explosion lands.