Touching The Void (2003)
FilmFour, Pathé

Description

In Touching the Void, director Kevin McDonald ("One Day in September") tells Joe Simpson's compelling story by combining talking-head interviews with Simpson and Yates, and stunningly photographed narrative footage, in which Simpson and Yates' ordeal is actually re-enacted on the Peruvian Siula Grande. McDonald's footage is both engrossing and eye-popping; it could easily stand alone as its own one-of-a-kind adventure film. The interviews, however, add depth to the film and make Touching The Void a unique, thrilling, and emotional piece of cinema.

Tags

Adventure, Climbing

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Now there is a movie more frightening than my nightmares. "Touching the Void" is the most harrowing movie about mountain climbing I have seen, or can imagine.
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10 Urban Cinefile | Andrew Urban

Kevin Macdonald's extraordinary film creates a new benchmark for dramatised adventure documentaries, coming close to being both a dramatic feature film with actors, and a documentary resting on real - and amazing - events.
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9.2 DVD Verdict | Patrick Naugle

This is one of those movies that you watch with your mouth wide open. You can hardly believe that all of the facts happened, and yet here are the two men who lived the tale, telling you directly of the horrors they were forced to face.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

To describe Touching the Void as a mountaineering documentary would be to do this breathtaking drama an injustice. By intercutting narration from the climbers themselves with a nail-biting reconstruction of their remarkable adventure in the Peruvian Andes, the film has the best of both genres: the authentic stamp of factual storytelling and the edge-of-the-seat tension of a dramatic movie.
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9.0 Eye For Film | Angus Wolfe Murray

This is a story of courage and bloody minded determination. It is inconceivable that Hollywood, with all its money and special effects, could have improved on what Macdonald achieves on a limited budget and no tricks.
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9.0 FutureMovies

... in a true testimony to the power of the narrative, knowledge of the eventual outcome detracts nothing from the exhilarating story.
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8.8 ReelViews | James Berardinelli

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction… and also potentially more nail-biting and harder to believe. Touching the Void is an extreme example of this - a man versus nature epic so amazing that, if it was presented in a strictly narrative format, viewers would doubt its veracity.
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8.8 Reel | Tim Knight

This stunning docudrama from Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin MacDonald (One Day in September) has the tragic grandeur of great literature, but this story of survival is all the more incredible because it's true.
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8.3 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

At its heart, Touching The Void contends with the physical and spiritual dilemma of facing the unknown and overcoming paralyzing fear in order to emerge reborn on the other side.
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8.0 efilmcritic.com | MP Bartley

Whatever your worst day was, it's unlikely that it's anything like Joe Simpsons and Simon Yates worst day.
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8.0 filmcritic.com | Jules Brenner

Bringing the ordeal to us in icy, vivid detail are cameramen Keith Partridge, Simon Wagen, and Dan Shoring. Under some fine direction by Kevin Macdonald, they produce all the coverage needed to capture the excitement of a monster challenge, the heartbreak of hopelessness, and an outcome that turned failure into something else. It makes for a gripping tale and a jaw-dropping documentary.
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7.0 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

It's fair to say that the film's essential drama has as much to do with Mike Eley's stunning cinematography as with eth narrative proper: it's difficult to put into words just how white, cold, and endless the imagery of the mountain can seem, the climbers so small against its terrifying expanse, the blue or black or stormy sky looming over them.
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6.0 New York Times | Dave Kehr

This is compelling stuff, but there is something deeply distracting in the use of recreated material.
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