Touching the Void
Kevin Macdonald
London Film Festival, 2003

Alan Docherty

Touching the Void tells the remarkable story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who in 1985 scaled the west face of Siula Grande, a remote, twenty one thousand foot peak in the Peruvian Andes.

Attempting to conquer the near perpendicular mountain face of Siula Grande may seem like idiocy. For many, mountaineers can be dismissed as thrill-seeking adrenaline junkies. Nevertheless, there is much to admire abut these young daredevils; strength, endurance, skill, bravery, single-mindedness and implicit trust in their climbing partners.

Trying to explain his enthusiasm for mountaineering in Touching the Void, one climber says: 'There's not enough risk in the real world', and he has a point. Modern life is pretty sanitised for a young man growing up in the Western world, where life is as safe and as dull as it ever has been. Nevertheless it's an extreme reaction and it's still not clear why these two young men from England should travel to Peru to risk climbing a part of a mountain that had never been scaled before. Is it worth it? Are the thrills compensation for freezing half to death in a crevasse? It seems so. After all, even after his close brush with death, Joe Simpson has carried on climbing.

Simpson's bestselling book has been translated into 14 languages and sold more than 500,000 copies. And now a film: the story is remarkable. Simpson, who has already broken a leg after one serious fall, is left for dead after a second. But he refuses to surrender his life, escapes from a crevasse and literally crawls down the mountain alone, battered, exhausted and dehydrated to the base camp, hoping his friends haven't give up on him and started their journey home.

The power of Touching the Void lies not just in the astonishing story but its docu-drama style. Kevin Macdonald (director of the Oscar-winning One Day in September) uses dramatic re-enactments of the events and intersperses them with the three participants givng their testimony of the experience straight to camera. The effect is powerful, and Macdonald's decision to film on location pays huge dividends: Touching the Void is visually stunning, the scenery providing the cold, unforgiving backdrop to the hot rush of human struggle, which Joe Simpson and Simon Yates tell with passion and verve.

Castle Rock Pictures at one point developed a non-documentary feature film version which would have starred Tom Cruise as Joe Simpson. Instead of Cruise's Hollywood pyrotechnics, though, we listen to the protagonists talking about their adventure - it's more powerful than anything Cruise could have achieved.