Kevin Macdonald makes real events frighteningly immediate, giving testimony the tension of a thriller. We rate him most highly when he stays close to practical decisions and lets the people who made them explain what they faced.
Fi1m perspective
In Touching the Void (2003), a climber recounts what happened while a reconstruction makes us consider the effort of getting through it. The speaker’s presence need not end the suspense. Kevin Macdonald gives Joe Simpson and Simon Yates time to explain decisions that are easy to judge from a sofa, and harder to imagine making in exhaustion. We were frightened by how much effort each movement seemed to require in the reconstructed climbing.
He began with biographical documentaries before One Day in September (1999) established his reputation for investigative filmmaking. The Last King of Scotland (2006) took him into fiction features, followed by studio work such as State of Play (2009). He returned to documentary with Marley (2012) and Whitney (2018), while continuing to make fiction. He also carries documentary habits into his fiction, allowing scenes to unfold rather than relying on conventional coverage of each exchange.
Macdonald’s patience with the speakers is matched by precise work from his collaborators. In Touching the Void, editor Justine Wright keeps the testimony and reconstruction moving as one account, so returning to an interview does not let us relax. Alex Heffes’s score sustains the unease without diverting attention from the climb. Macdonald keeps the practical difficulty clear enough for both contributions to work, giving the cutting and music something more substantial to do than manufacture excitement.
That concentration also limits the film. Its slow opening offers less insight into the climbers’ lives than the time spent might lead us to expect, and their reasons for mountaineering remain underexplored. We learn much more about enduring the mountain than about wanting to be there. Some critics have raised a related concern about One Day in September, arguing that thriller technique takes priority over substance.
We would welcome a Macdonald film that spent as much time on why people seek danger as on how they endure it. His handling of Simpson and Yates suggests he could ask without sounding superior. Start with Touching the Void, and give its opening the patience that the climbing will repay.
Biography
Kevin Macdonald (born 28 October 1967) is a Scottish film director. He began his career with documentaries, including a biography of his grandfather, the screenwriter Emeric Pressburger. His 1999 documentary One Day in September, about the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Macdonald directed the climbing documentary Touching the Void (2003), which received the BAFTA Award for Best British Film. Subsequent feature films include the drama The Last King of Scotland (2006), the political thriller State of Play (2009), the Bob Marley documentary Marley (2012), and the legal drama The Mauritanian (2021). He is the brother of producer Andrew Macdonald.
