Squished somewhere in between birth and death there’s a natural instinct to survive. Sometimes this instinct takes you to places you were never thought possible and out of places you never wanted to be in the first place. Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void is a film that explores survival and the natural purity behind it. Although on the surface it looks and feels like a mountain movie not needing comparisons to Alive, K2 or Everest (and definitely not Extreme Ops), but Touching the Void is much more. It’s a meditation on the want and need to keep on keepin’ on, even if it means with a Boney M ear worm ringing through your head.
In 1985 Joe Simpson and Simon Yates were two eager climbers looking for the big conquer. Some might have called them arrogant. So they set out to scale the western face of Siula Grande in the Andes of Peru. It was a hill that had never been successfully climbed. Joe and Simon went at it with great confidence, packing very lightly expecting to go up and down in a relatively fast amount of time. The climb up went all right, but on the way down the weather was just the beginning of their bad luck. Let’s just say it gets pretty bad and if it weren’t for a conventionally odd storytelling choice, it would have made for some tremendous suspense.
But within the first couple of minutes both Joe and Simon are on screen describing what was going on. Touching the Void is set up and played out not as a guessing game as to whether or not the two would survive tragedy, but rather how they survived. It’s a story so spectacular, I was looking for inconsistencies to prove they were frauds who’d weave a good yarn and moved up a notch from crop circles and Bigfoot. But alas, they really are remarkable survivors.
Based on an international best seller, Touching the Void is neither a documentary nor is it entirely a re-dramatization. Macdonald shrewdly blends the genres much like American Splendor did last year. As the recreated climb of Joe and Simon (played by Nicholas Aaron and Brendan Mackey) begins, the real Joe and Simon are shown alive and well sitting in front of a gray backdrop giving essentially what is colour commentary to the dramatized version of their climb. In essence, it’s a lot like watching a film with the DVD commentary track built right into the movie itself.
The mountain scenery is gorgeous and Macdonald shoots it as such that it becomes a very real and living merciless antagonist. Macdonald plays some simple but effective tricks to really evoke the strengths of film as a storytelling medium. For example, at one point Joe is ready to give up. But then Boney M starts running through his mind. He can’t get it out no matter how hard he tries. So the soundtrack picks up and the camera starts spinning. To reflect Joe’s disorientation, the music skips and the picture fades in and out. What could have been represented by a man simply writhing on the ground in agony all of a sudden became a multi-layered look at one man’s psyche when taken to the edge.
Even without the suspense of survival, Touching the Void is still very much suspenseful. The challenge is so fierce and Macdonald taps into the innate sense of survival so strongly that I came very close to sharing in Joe and Simon’s pain even though I have never experienced anything close to what they went through nor was I in Peru in 1985.
Touching the Void is as gripping as they come. It’s a unique film that freely jumps genres in order to tell the best story possible, and what a doozy it is.
Touching the Void Gallery
Trailer
