What would you do?
Touching the Void

Stars Brendan Mackey, Aaron Nicholas, Joe Simpson, Simon Yates and Richard Hawkins. Rated M. 107 minutes.
Reviewer: David Sibley

Rating:

Simon Yates, played by Aaron Nicholas, makes a hard decision to cut the rope that his friend, Joe Simpson, is holding on to.

Joe Simpson, played by Brendan Mackey, crawls across the glacier with a broken leg after surviving falling down a crevasse.

You’ve been holding your mate hanging on a rope over an ice cliff for over an hour. Your arms and shoulders are burning with the strain and then you begin to slip in your icy seat in the snow.

You can’t see your mate below but you know he has a badly broken leg. You’re high on a savage mountain in a remote part of Peru. The nearest road is two days walk away.

You slip again. What do you do? This isn’t an adventurous training activity where there’s an instructor nearby to pull you to safety. It’s just you and him. You slip again, again, again, heading for the void in which your mate is hanging.

Do you hang on and both of you die? Or do you save yourself? In 1985, British climber Simon Yates made that decision – he cut the rope and saved himself.

His mate Joe Simpson, hanging over the ice cliff, fell and, for all Yates knew, died. Yates then dug a cave in the snow of the mountain they had successfully climbed that morning and the next morning completed his descent.

The mountain was Siula Grande, a 21,000ft monster in the Andes mountains, which run the length of South America.

Yates and Simpson, two madkeen mountaineers in their early 20s, had decided to climb its west face, a towering wall of ice and rock which noone had climbed successfully before.

They climbed Alpine-style, that is, the two of them with no support at all. All they would need – ropes, equipment, food – would be on their backs.

If something went wrong, then the chances of survival were low. But they were young, fit and, as Simpson said, wanted to climb the world.

They travelled to Peru and on the way to Siula Grande, recruited a fellow Brit, backpacker Richard Hawkins, to come to the mountain and mind their base camp. The climb up the west face took three days.

On their way down from the summit, traversing along the north ridge, Simpson was descending a ice cliff when his ice axe slipped. He fell and horribly broke his left leg.

Yates made the decision to lower Simpson down the mountain, using two lengths of rope knotted together to make a 300ft line.

Yates would let Simpson, in incredible agony, down the slope until they reached the bottom where a glacier joined the mountain.

He had no choice but to work fast – Simpson was in shock and the side of a 21,000ft mountain was no place to rest and wait for help which wouldn’t, come. And then Simpson went over the cliff. After holding his mate for nearly two hours, Yates cut the rope.

Four days later, Simpson crawled out of the rocks near the camp where Yates and Hawkins were sleeping.

He had survived a fall of more than 100ft, landing in a crevasse. Incredibly, he survived, making his way from the crevasse on to the glacier and then crawling all the way back to base camp.

After his recovery (including six operations on his leg), Simpson wrote Touching the Void, the story of what happened on Siula Grande, and the basis for this documentary, made by director Kevin Macdonald.

A key motivation for writing the book was to defend Yates. After the story became public, many in the British mountaineering community criticised Yates for cutting the rope and leaving Simpson to die.

Macdonald used a simple and effective narrative device of having the two climbers and Hawkins tell their story looking direct into the camera.

He then interweaved the story of the climb and Simpson’s survival between the interviews, all the time driving the story through their words.

The actors, Brendan Mackey, who played Simpson, and Aaron Nicholas as Yates, do not have much dialogue – there’s no need for expository dialogue as they recreate what happened.

Shot in Peru, at Siula Grande, and the European Alps, the scenery is dramatic and cold, mixing close-ups and vistas with powerful effect to the narrative of Simpson and Yates.

At times the horror is chillingly underscored by casual, understated self-deprecating humour.

Simpson comes across as incredibly passionate and driven, Yates more as a typical phlegmatic Englishman who did what had to done – the kind of chap who would make a hard decision, not because he wanted to or liked to, but because that’s what a decent chap would do.

Go see if you can answer the question: What would you do?