January 23, 2004 | In June 1985, two young British climbers attempted to scale the previously unclimbed west face of Siula Grande, a 21,000-foot peak in the Peruvian Andes. Undaunted by the challenge of maneuvering up near-vertical icefields, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates attacked the mountain “Alpine style” – attached to each other by a rope – and reached the summit within three days. Shortly after they started the trip back down, however, things began to go terribly wrong.
During a snowstorm on a high ridge, Simpson slipped and shattered his right leg, driving his femur through his kneecap. Worse, he soon found himself suspended in midair over a seemingly bottomless crevasse. Many feet above him, Yates could not see or hear his friend, and feared what he felt was dead weight at the other end of the rope. He knew that, sooner or later, he would be pulled from his position on the mountain face if he didn’t cut himself loose from Simpson. Trouble is, he also knew that if Simpson somehow were still alive, the fall would almost certainly kill him. Yates paused and pondered. Then he took out his knife.
Director Kevin Macdonald recounts the true-life drama of Simpson and Yates in Touching the Void, an inspired hybrid of documentary and dramatic re-creation, and the movie is so terrifically suspenseful that it often tricks you into ignoring, or even forgetting, the obvious. Right from the start, Macdonald makes it very clear that both Simpson and Yates survived their ordeal. Indeed, the two men appear separately in on-camera interviews throughout the movie, and provide alternating running commentaries during scenes featuring actors and stunt climbers who re-create events that no dramatist would dare to invent. (A base-camp companion, Richard Hawking, also appears as himself and, in the re-creations, as a character.)
But it’s not so much the final destination as the harrowing journey that Touching the Void wants to examine. Macdonald – who earned an Oscar for One Day in September (1999), his documentary about terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics – immerses his audience into his gripping narrative by focusing with a ferocious intensity on the step-by-step, minute-to-minute details of survival. Questions are methodically raised, then precisely answered. Can Simpson make it to the bottom of the crevasse? If so, how can he complete the journey back down? Can he hop? Crawl? Move himself through sheer force of will? And what about Yates? How will he manage his own descent? And why does he want to linger at the base of the mountain? Is he searching his soul for a way to forgive himself? Or is he waiting for a miracle he can’t or won’t dare to hope for?
There is no trace of self-pity or sentimentality in the commentary of the climbers – they are paragons of clipped British understatement – and the movie makes no attempt to mine their misadventure for spiritual uplift or facile metaphors. Touching the Void just gives us the facts, with stunningly persuasive skill. And very much like George Butler’s The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001), a similarly amazing tale of survival, it gently prods us to consider this: For whatever reason, some men simply refuse to die.
