After everything I said when I reviewed Beast, deciding to sit down for yet another survival flick might get me to belabour the point that this isn’t really my genre. Then again, in my defence, the trailer for this thing showed more characterisation than the whole of Beast, so I figured I’d at least give it a chance. So long as this provides me with some reason to care about who is doing the surviving here, we should be good. And to the film’s credit, I certainly got reasons to care… even if they weren’t necessarily in the characters’ favour.
The story is fairly straight-forward: Two best friends decide to climb a 2000-foot transmission tower in order to get one of them, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), out of a year-long depression since the death of her husband Dan (Mason Gooding). Considering said death was due to falling off a rock face while free-climbing, I should point out that ‘straight-forward’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘makes sense’.
Admittedly, I’m willing to show some leniency towards the naked “what were you even thinking?!” of the premise because of the characters involved. Both Becky and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), the latter of whom came up with this idea in the first place, are basically using this to try and get over the trauma of Dan’s death. They were both affected by it, albeit in diametrically opposed ways: Becky withdrew into the bottle, whereas Hunter went even further into the thrill-seeking and even got into social media to show it off. As a means of at least trying to find a happy medium between those extremes, I get why they’d think this kind of shock to the system would help, even if Free Solo was all I needed to see to know that this could go hideously wrong. Which, of course, it does.
However, while I’m willing to be empathetic towards this whole thing, despite how silly it ultimately is, director Scott Mann and co-writer Jonathan Frank seem determined to make me hate at least one of the main characters here. Well, mission accomplished there, because Hunter is a complete twat. Alongside the initial build-up to the climb, with all manner of throbbingly obvious signs that this is a bad idea, most of those signs end up coming from Hunter herself. Personally, I wouldn’t see someone nearly get hit by a truck because they were too busy streaming behind the wheel, with me riding shotgun, and then decide that free-climbing anything with them would work out well. Especially when the signs of her being exceptionally abrasive only get worse from there.
But even with that rather glaring issue, and the plot being rather naff (up to and including a plot twist that I’d already seen in at least two other survival flicks I’ve reviewed), it’s a testament to the filmmaking on offer here that it still works on a surface thrill level. MacGregor’s cinematography combined with Rob Hall’s editing really pull the audience into the characters’ feeling of vertigo, looking equally beautiful in its panoramic visuals and terrifying in the how and why of us seeing it. Credit to Tim Despic’s soundtrack too, which adds a lot to the atmosphere and rising tension levels, climbing steadily pretty much right from the start to the very end.
More so than any of the other survival thrillers I’ve looked at, this most reminds me of Kidnap in how it’s quite good at providing genre thrills… provided you can ignore how dodgy the writing and even the acting can get. It’s a definite barrier to entry, and I say that as someone who was able to rationalise the stupid and frequently unlikeable actions of the leads, but if survival is your bag, it’s sure to get your palms sweaty. And if you didn’t start rapping the rest of the song just from that, you’re a better person than I.
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