The Best Adventure Movies: Touching the Void

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Outside Magazine, June 2005

Outside Goes to the Movies
A Perfect 10
Touching the Void

By Steven Kotler & The Editors

3. Touching the Void (2003)
"We didn't give a damn about anyone else or anything else and we wanted to climb the world. And it was fun; it was just brilliant fun. And every now and then it went wildly wrong. Then it wasn't."

So says the real-world Joe Simpson at the opening of what is, hands down, the best movie ever made about survival—and the only feature film that's gotten mountaineering right.

"Touching the Void stands head and shoulders above any other mountaineering film in its integrity, structure, and sheer tension."—Chris Bonington, Alpinist

Based on Simpson's best-selling 1998 book, the film details Simpson and climbing partner Simon Yates's 1985 ascent of Peru's 20,853-foot Siula Grande. Using studio interviews with the two Brits and a dialogue-free reenactment shot in the Alps, director Kevin Macdonald recounts their story with penetrating authenticity. On the descent, Simpson slides off a cliff. Yates, believing his partner dead and struggling against being pulled over the edge, cuts their connecting rope. The aftermath—Simpson's plummet into a deep crevasse and miraculous crawl to safety, and Yates's tormenting guilt—is agonizing to witness. Even when they reunite, there's no triumph, just an acknowledgment that the pain of the experience will dull but never vanish.

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