Simpson, incredibly, falls into a crevice but is slowed and saved by several snow bridges he crashes through before he lands on an ice ledge with a drop on either side. If you plan to see the film - it will not disappoint you - you might want to save the rest of the review until later. What we can hardly believe is what happens next, and what makes the film into an incredible story of human endurance. Simpson says he would have done the same thing under the circumstances, and we believe him. Simpson was hanging in mid air, Yates was slipping, and unless he cut the rope they would both surely die.
After an hour or so, he realized they were at an impasse. Because they were out of earshot in the blizzard, all Yates could know was that the rope was tight and not moving, and his feet were slipping out of the holes he had dug to brace them. A good method in theory, but then, after dark, in a snow storm, Yates lowered Simpson over a precipice and left him hanging in mid-air over a drop of unknowable distance.
That meant Simpson had dug in and anchored himself and it was safe for Yates to climb down and repeat the process. Yates' plan was to lower Simpson 300 feet and wait for a tug on the rope.
#Climb fall human guys movie#
The movie was shot on location in Peru and also in the Alps, and the climbing sequences are always completely convincing the use of actors in those scenes is not a distraction because their faces are so bearded, frost-bitten and snow-caked that we can hardly recognize them. We also see the ordeal re-enacted by two actors ( Brendan Mackey as Simpson, Nicholas Aaron as Yates), and experienced climbers are used as stunt doubles. We know that Simpson survived, because the movie shows the real-life Simpson and Yates, filmed against plain backgrounds, looking straight on into the camera, remembering their adventure in their own words. Both of them knew that a broken leg on a two-man climb, with rescue impossible, was a death sentence, and indeed Simpson tells us he was rather surprised that Yates decided to stay with him and try to get him down. But it was disastrous: He broke his leg, driving the calf bone up through the knee socket. Roped together, they worked with one man always anchored, and so Yates was able to hold the rope when Simpson had a sudden fall. The ascent was doable, but on the way down, the storms disoriented them and the drifts concealed the hazard of hidden crevices and falls. They limited their supplies to reduce weight, and planned to go up and down quickly. They were fit and in good training, and bold enough to try the "one push" method of climbing, in which they carried all their gear with them instead of establishing caches along the route. The movie is about Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, two Brits in their mid-20s who were determined to scale the forbidding west face of a mountain named Siula Grande, in the Peruvian Andes. "Touching the Void" was, for me, more of a horror film than any actual horror film could ever be. Not for me the discussions about the utility of the "pseudo-documentary format," or questions about how the camera happened to be waiting at the bottom of the crevice when Simpson fell in. I simply sat there before the screen, enthralled, fascinated and terrified.
I didn't take a single note during this film.
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