★★★★
“Nope. NopeNopeNope. Nope.”
I never considered myself to be afraid of heights. I respect them, sure. But I am capable of going up the ladder to change that annoying smoke alarm battery without a safety net. This film though, literally gave me sweaty palms. It’s about climber Becky Connor (Currey) who lost her husband Dan (Gooding) in a rockface accident a year before, and has spiralled down into alcoholism and depression since. Her father (Morgan) gets her best friend Shiloh Hunter (Gardner) to intervene, and she convinces Becky the best thing is to get back on horse, with a climb of a two thousand feet tall, abandoned TV mast.
The journey up is where the moist hands started. I don’t care how nice the views might be, I’m afraid it’s going to be a no from me, dawg. Adding to the fraught tension, is the focus by Mann on the decaying structure: rust, missing bolts and general creakiness. It’s like Final Destination: you know something is inevitably going to go terribly wrong, it’s just a question of when, and the specifics. It duly does, leaving the pair stranded near the top, on a platform about the size of our dining table, with no route down or way to call for help. The rest of the film is the struggle of Becky and Hunter (she uses her last name, or her social media identity of “Danger Deb”) to find a way to do one or the other.
Most of it is well-written, with the two women using every bit of ingenuity, as well as both their physical and mental strength, in that struggle. While I was ahead of the plot a couple of times – some of the foreshadowing isn’t as subtle as it could be – there was one doozy of a twist near the end, that we definitely did not see coming. By the end, there’s no doubt Becky is an utterly badass, prepared to survive by any means necessary. My main complaint, storywise, was the clunky shoehorning in of a wedge issue to divide her and Hunter. This served no dramatic purpose, and had me rolling my eyes at the incongruity of it all. Hello: you are two thousand feet in the air!
Technically, however, it’s very well done, giving the viewer a real sense of what it must be like. If you are the slightest bit sensitive about heights, this film will find out, force its way into those cracks, and use them as leverage, to an almost queasy extent. I found it easy to believe they were genuinely up there, even if neither lead actress has quite the ripped physique of a real climber, someone like Slovenian Janja Gambret. I did wonder if it was potentially going to go full The Descent on us at the end, and embrace its inner bleakness. I won’t say whether or not it does. However, I suspect that the next time our smoke alarm starts to beep, its battery will have to change itself.
Dir: Scott Mann
Star: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mason Gooding