Touching the Void

Reviewed by RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * *)


Some films affect you in funny ways. Touching the Void will probably have you feeling thirsty, hypothermic and emotionally exhausted. It's meant to be a documentary. It does the job of 10 thrillers.

As its end credits roll it makes you feel lucky to be alive, even if the closest you come to mountaineering is recognising the inspirational bloke on the $5 bill.

It also makes you feel strangely vulnerable, especially in the lower limbs, as it comes with what must be the most cringe-inducing scenes involving a broken leg ever committed to celluloid.

As the feature on the previous pages explain, Touching the Void recreates the story of two English climbers, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, who in 1985 decided to scale Siula Grande, a formidable 6400m peak in the Peruvian Andes.

What happened up there has already been the subject of a bestseller by Simpson.

They made it up there okay. But on the way down, the weather closed in, temperatures and visibility plunged - and so did Simpson. He fell, breaking his leg and was left dangling by his rope over a precipice, slowly tugging Yates down with him.

Yates couldn't drag him back up, couldn't see his partner and with no signal from the rope between them, faced only one real choice - to cut the line and try to get himself down alive.

It's the sort of scene we've seen in many a drama involving mountaineering - the trite thriller Vertical Limit being the most recent example. However, Touching The Void shows us how that dilemma really feels, and what happened at both ends of that severed rope.

Director Macdonald, who won an Academy Award for his brilliant One Day In September about the terrorist attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics, meticulously reconstructs the events on the mountain - a climber mate I took to the screening noted that even the gear they use is right for the mid-80s - using actors as the climbers.

But the human drama comes as much from the present-day accounts of Yates and Simpson.

They are interviewed separately in stark close-up and though you would think they would be recounting their story by rote nearly 20 years after the event, their reflections on the events are vivid and their demeanour insightful.

It all makes for a film that's an absolute heart-stopper. Oh and the scenery's not bad either.

CAST: Joe Simpson, Simon Yates, Brendan Mackey, Nicholas Aaron.
DIRECTOR: Kevin Macdonald

RATING: M (offensive language)

RUNNING TIME: 106 mins

SCREENING: Rialto Auckland, Berkeley Takapuna & Village Queen St from Thursday