Touching the Void

Touching the Void leaves you emotionally and physically spent, and grateful it was only a movie, not a mountain, you had to endure.

Awesome and harrowing.

As a meditation on extreme human endeavour, character, friendship and the mysteries revealed by facing death, it provides much food for thought.

Most movies of this type re-create the action far from the actual scene of the crime, but Macdonald has invented a new subgenre: a docudrama in which the docu and the drama are equally authentic.

The facts drop away, and it becomes impossible not to read the movie symbolically -- as a journey to the center of the earth, or farther still.

For a movie like this, touching the void just isn't enough. It has to touch the audience, too.

Excruciatingly tense story of a terrible accident.

"Void" plummets into the nucleus of instinct and consciousness - survival a near-primordial pursuit beyond bravery or weakness. It concocts no comfort about what was gained, but stares in transfixed, unforgettable awe at the horror of all that was lost.

"Touching the Void" towers above the rest of that rarest of all film genres, the docudrama.

This harrowing, white-knuckle tale of human endurance and gut-wrenching dilemma mingles the dramatization of these events and interviews with both climbers into an unforgettable, sometimes comically deadpan nightmare.

A slow starter which builds into a chilling depiction of the agonising disintegration of body and mind as they are exposed to the elements.

About a primal war waged by man against both himself and the natural world that surrounds him.