The Bridge (2006)
Easy There Tiger Productions

Description

The Golden Gate Bridge is an iconic structure; a symbol of San Francisco, the West, freedom – and something more, something spiritual, something words cannot describe. The director and crew spent an entire year focusing on the Bridge. Running cameras for almost every daylight minute, they documented nearly two dozen suicides and a great many unrealized attempts. In addition, the director captured nearly 100 hours of incredibly frank, deeply personal, often heart-wrenching interviews with the families and friends of the departed, as well as with several of the attempters themselves.

Tags

The Golden Gate Bridge, Suicide

Collected reviews and ratings

9.0 DVD Verdict | Dylan Charles

Considering this is his first documentary, Steel has done a remarkable job. The Bridge is terribly sad and even moving. It shows the problem, a big problem, that needs a solution and needed to be pointed out.
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8.8 TV Guide | Ken Fox

It's not so hard to imagine how this most beautiful of man-made structures might fill even the most cockeyed optimist with thoughts of insignificance, despair and self-destruction.
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8.0 Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan

"The Bridge" is both a beautiful film and a disturbing one, and the connection between those two characteristics makes it the most disquieting of documentaries.
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8.0 Amazon user reviews

It's an amazing piece of journalism into what others have already described as taboo in normal journalism. The comments from the families and friends of the jumpers weave the story together incredibly.
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7.5 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

How could Steel keep filming? In fact, he made several calls to authorities to try and save people, but The Bridge crosses a disquieting line. It may be the first poetic snuff film.
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7.0 New York Times | Stephen Holden

“The Bridge,” an eerie and indelible documentary about suicide, juxtaposes transcendent beauty and personal tragedy as starkly as any film I can recall.
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7.0 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

Steel compares his film, or at least the spectacular images it captures, to Brueghel's painting "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus," and if that sounds unbelievably grandiose, you haven't seen it.
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7.0 Variety | Dennis Harvey

"The Bridge" is undeniably powerful stuff. But whether it's particularly helpful is less clear.
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6.0 BBC | David Mattin

There's something strangely unsatisfying about The Bridge. The interviews with bewildered friends and relatives at centre of this film are moving, but in the end they fail to reveal what lay in the hearts of those who died.
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5.8 The Onion A.V. Club | Nathan Rabin

A strange combination of art and snuff film, The Bridge aspires to humanize the people who kill themselves at the Golden Gate Bridge, but ends up mostly reducing its subjects to their flamboyant and very public deaths.
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4.0 filmcritic.com | Chris Cabin

The Bridge conjures up ideas of suicide and why people do it, but it never fully explores them, nor does it really capture the allure of the Golden Gate.
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