Director: Gene Fallaize
Few frontmen have been mythologized as quickly as Ian Curtis, and Control revisits that mythology directly, tracing the singer's rise with Joy Division alongside the personal strain that closed his life at twenty-three.
What is Control about?
Director Gene Fallaize centers the film on the tangle of pressures pulling at Curtis in the years before his death: a demanding tour schedule, a marriage under strain, a new relationship, and worsening health he largely kept from his bandmates. Rather than treating Joy Division's rise as a straightforward triumph, the film reads it as a slow squeeze, following Curtis from local shows into wider recognition while showing how little support existed for what he was actually carrying underneath the music.
Cast & crew
The ensemble surrounding the central performance includes Kevin Spacey, Lauren Metcalfe, Mark Hampton, Natasha Kemball, Eire Farrell, Aaron Liburd, Joshua Frater-Loughlin and Adam Southwick, filling out the small circle of managers, bandmates, and partners who orbited Curtis during Joy Division's brief run. The cast plays the period with restraint, letting the music and the silences between scenes carry as much weight as the dialogue does.
Context & significance
Control belongs to a small but persistent line of films revisiting post-punk's founding years, when a handful of bands out of Manchester and its surrounding towns reshaped what rock music could sound like across only a couple of records. Joy Division released two studio albums before Curtis's death in 1980, and both have kept circulating well beyond the scene that first produced them. A 2024 production directed by Gene Fallaize, this telling arrives decades after the events it covers, carrying the distance and the hindsight that time affords.
Where & how to watch
Control is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, with Farsi dubbing and Farsi subtitles included for viewers who prefer either option. The platform's interface runs in Farsi throughout, built with Persian-speaking audiences in mind wherever they happen to be watching from.