Touching the Void

Based on the true-life story of British mountaineer Joe Simpson, who went merrily climbing in the Peruvian Andes in 1985 with his mate Simon Yates, Touching The Void is another profoundly hair-raising documentary from the accomplished Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin MacDonald (One Day In September). Basically, the film centres on a nasty accident which left the unfortunate Simpson hanging several hundred feet over an ice crevasse with his leg shattered to bits: his panicked partner cuts the rope, leaving him alone and unaided in a furious snowstorm.
He is then required, nay obliged, to journey down a vertical Peruvian precipice in a state of some disrepair. In one of the film’s more frightening moments, at the edge of madness and death, his internal jukebox strikes up an endless loop of Boney M’s ‘Brown Girl In the Ring’.
Touching The Void, which intersperses interviews with the two men with dramatic recreations of events, is as grippingly put together as anything you’ll see in the cinema this year, a feat made all the more impressive when one considers that the evident co-operation of the clearly alive-and-kicking protagonists gives away the happy ending somewhat. An epic treatment for an epic survival story, and an early runner for the year’s best documentary.

106 mins. Cert 12pg. Opens January 30