Kevin Macdonald makes an absorbing, often frightening film through the climbers’ accounts and convincing reconstructions. The opening takes its time, but the suspense survives the presence of the men telling the story.
Touching the Void is a gripping survival documentary, despite a hesitant start. Kevin Macdonald combines the climbers’ own accounts with dramatised reconstructions, asking us to imagine the physical experience while we listen to people who can describe it. That could be an awkward arrangement, especially in a story whose suspense might seem to depend on withholding what happens. It works because knowing that someone can tell a story is scant preparation for watching what they have to endure.
The interviews give the film its steadiness. Joe Simpson and Simon Yates have room to explain their decisions, and Macdonald does not hurry us towards a judgement on them. That matters when exhaustion can make a choice look quite different to the person facing it and to somebody sitting comfortably afterwards. We were frightened by the reconstructed climbing. The visible effort makes the danger difficult to dismiss, even with the men themselves there to recount it.
Brendan Mackey plays Simpson in the reconstructions, with Nicholas Aaron as Yates. Both make the exertion convincing, keeping our attention on the difficulty of the climb without inviting us to spend much time admiring the performances. Patrick Bill’s production design helps the staged material remain credible beside the testimony. These passages are persuasive enough that we stop checking them against the interviews, though the film never conceals that they are dramatised.
Mike Eley and Keith Partridge’s mountain photography gives the landscape enough space to be beautiful and alarming at once. Its scale makes the climbers’ vulnerability plain, while the climbing sequences remain readable as physical actions. We can follow the effort without knowing the sport. There is pleasure in looking at these images, but it never quite cancels the wish that everybody would find somewhere less exposed to stand.
Justine Wright’s editing makes the interviews and reconstructions feel like parts of the same account. Returning to a speaker could release the tension; here, the recollection keeps our attention on what the next stretch of climbing will demand. Alex Heffes’s music contributes effectively to that pressure, reinforcing the unease created by the images. Macdonald gives the cutting and score something substantial to work with by keeping our attention on the practical and psychological difficulty of enduring the mountain.
The slow opening is the drawback, and the early patience asked of us is not entirely repaid by what we learn about the people. Macdonald is so intent on the mountain experience that curiosity about lives beyond it receives little encouragement. That narrowness becomes less troublesome as the film gathers force, though it limits how well we know the men outside this ordeal. Anyone hoping for a broad portrait of mountaineering, or much examination of its appeal, should adjust their expectations.
The survival film can become tiresome when it starts offering instructions on how the rest of us should live. Macdonald largely avoids that temptation by staying close to the climbers’ experiences, allowing their endurance to be remarkable without requiring a lesson from it. Watch it if you can bear the physical distress; the slow start is worth forgiving.
