Published Jun 5, 2026, 12:06 PM EDT
Erik Hawkins is an award-winning writer and editor who’s been obsessed with cinema since he was old enough to hold Roger Ebert’s Video Home Companion in his hands. He lives in NYC, where he rabidly watches everything from the newest releases to the more odd and obscure, and regularly shares his thoughts on Letterboxd. From ghost-writing fiction and webisodes in South America to local news, trial coverage, and politics in NYC, he’s rarely put down his laptop over the past 15 years.
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Despite the fact that he was one of the last century’s most talented filmmakers, much of Jonathan Demme’s filmography outside The Silence of the Lambs (one of two Demme pictures preserved by the National Film Registry) remains criminally underseen — especially his 2004 remake The Manchurian Candidate. Based upon the 1962 John Frankenheimer thriller starring Frank Sinatra, Demme’s film rockets the original from paranoid Cold War fantasies into the ambient unease of the War on Terror.
Both these facts should make for a film that feels like a relic, but The Manchurian Candidate only feels more real today, with its false-flag political assassinations, “fake news,” bioengineering, and brainwashing. Also featuring near career-best performances from Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and Liev Schreiber, this jangly thriller masterpiece is begging to be rediscovered, and is available for free on Pluto TV.
While the original The Manchurian Candidate dealt with veterans of the Korean War and America’s Cold War fear of Communist infiltrators, Demme’s remake casts Washington and Schreiber as Gulf War veterans who both survived a horrific ambush in Kuwait and go on to live very different civilian lives. Schreiber’s Raymond Prentiss Shaw receives a Medal of Honor for a daring rescue that neither man can quite remember, while Washington’s Bennett Marco lives in his shadow — and is haunted by disturbing dreams. Shaw, however, is angling for his party’s VP nomination (in perhaps the film’s only misstep, the characters’ party affiliations are never identified) at the behest of his ruthless political operative mother, played brilliantly by Streep.
“Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
The remake deals, of course, with brainwashing. With its antagonists upgraded from foreign Communists to global capitalists (“Manchurian” here refers to a sprawling biotech company), surprisingly little else is needed to bring the story up to date. Demme also brings his incredible aptitude for emotive close-ups and psychological subjectivity to bear on this classic thriller plot in ways that will remind viewers of the achievement that was The Silence of the Lambs. Marco and Shaw’s flashbacks in particular make brilliant use of both horror imagery and classic war movie iconography, while the empty patriotic doublespeak of the film’s bit players makes for a continuous, unnerving Greek chorus in the background.
For a remake released at the dawn of the War on Terror, The Manchurian Candidate hasn’t aged a day. A large part of that is Demme’s flawless visual storytelling, while another is the performances, all of which more than rise to the occasion. Chiefly, though, the film captures a pervasive, nerve-shredding paranoia that will ring as true to 2026 audiences. Politicians speak in empty platitudes about vague threats to U.S. security and “kitchen table issues” while shadowy giants like Manchurian Global pull the actual strings and not only pick cabinets, but insert behavior modification chips into its chosen candidates.
Demme said in an interview with the British Film Institute that his choice to update the film’s villains from Communists to war profiteers — in his words, “arguably the biggest threat to humanity today” — was an important one. He also shared that the production team was constantly changing the content of the film’s newscasts right until the final cut to try and stay relevant. The years have proven, though, that no such concern was warranted, as today’s audiences are likely to find their own, even eerier parallels between Manchurian Global and corporations like Palantir, Halliburton, and Neuralink. From its terrifying opening set in Kuwait to its disturbing assassination set piece climax, The Manchurian Candidate is a captivating update of Frankenheimer’s original and every bit as chilling as it was in 2004.
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Major Bennett Ezekiel Marco
Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (D-VA)
Congressman Raymond Prentiss Shaw (D-NY)