North Face

Rating

: * * * *

Verdict

:

White-knuckle high-altitude action but contrived subplot.

The north face of the Eiger, a 4000m peak in the Alps, has always exercised an unholy fascination for mountaineers. The editor of the

British Alpine Journal

colourfully described it as "an obsession for the mentally deranged": a wall of crumbling black rock and ice that rises a sheer 1800m above the valley floor, it claimed six lives before it was finally conquered in 1938 by a four-man team including Heinrich Harrer, who would find later fame as the writer of Seven Years in Tibet.

This sometimes knuckle-whitening drama follows the July 1936 expedition by the Bavarian duo Toni Kurz (Fuermann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Lukas), who had been climbing buddies since boyhood. On their ascent they are dogged, step-by-step, by an Austrian pair whose proximity turns out to have catastrophic consequences.

The year is significant: the push to solve "the last great problem of the Alps" assumed some urgency in Nazi Germany as the Reich hungered for news of exploits that would underline Aryan athletic supremacy.

That idea is carried in the film by a rather contrived subplot involving an opportunistic journalist (the always excellent Tukur): he's a Nazi loyalist who knows that only triumph or tragically noble failure will generate a good story and he has a lascivious eye on a junior colleague (Wokalek), a lifelong friend of the climbers.

This story plays out awkwardly, although it does deliver a good payoff line at the end. But the scenes on the mountain - a seamless combination of location sequences with ace climbers and close-up work filmed in a refrigerated studio - are spectacular.

Extraordinarily, the race took place in plain view of the terrace of a luxury hotel whose guests watched through binoculars; the cuts back and forth between snowstorm and silver service add a surreal touch to the tension.

Taken as a whole, this is not as accomplished a piece of work as

Touching the Void

with which it invites comparison, not least because in that film, we knew that the narrators survived, whereas here the historical record prepares us for the worst. But at its best, it's a vertiginous and heartstopping ride.

Peter Calder

Cast

: Benno Fuermann, Johanna Wokalek, Florian Lukas, Ulrich Tukur

Director

: Philipp Stoelzl

Running time

: 126 mins

Rating

: M (some content may disturb)

In German with English subtitles