Summit Fever review – super-real mountain-climbing drama is dizzying experience | Film

There’s an eerie closeup in Summit Fever of hair rising on the wrist of lead character Michael (Freddie Thorp), prior to a lightning strike. Julian Gilbey’s mountaineering drama isn’t just visually resplendent, it also has an impressive tactile familiarity with its milieu – placing its actors on real rock faces on the Eiger, Matterhorn and Mont Blanc mountains – that results in super-authentic climbing sequences (at least to this non-climber). Too bad then that it fumbles its dramatic handholds with a risible sub-Point Break storyline about peak-scaling addiction.

Thorp plays a Keanu-esque newbie who has quit his finance job to chase the Chamonix dream. Egged on by his loudmouth climbing partner JP (Michel Biel), Michael starts to push his limits on the region’s slopes, starting with the terrifyingly sheer Dent du Géant. And, despite initially being whipping boy for weathered American Leo (Ryan Phillippe), he fits right in with the young, dumb and full of kombucha hip local scene – including a budding hookup with piste-bashing French ski guide Isabelle (Mathilde Warnier).

The climbing sequences are genuinely exhilarating: in monumental drone shots homing in on minuscule figures on rock faces and in blow-by-blow crag-side set pieces that demonstrate the film-makers know whereof they speak (even with the odd low-budget shortcoming, such as suspiciously light-looking boulders). And with lightning backlighting alpine vistas in the final storm sequence, you feel right alongside the climbers in a way that even Hollywood big-hitters such as 2015’s Everest struggle with.

Best not look down at the story, though, which might have been able to stand up the cliched theme of adrenalised hubris if it hadn’t painted it so cartoonishly. Even the film’s expert free solo climber is at one moment lecturing about respecting the mountain, then arrogantly dynoing two seconds later. (Cue further philosophical finger-wagging from Phillippe, Swayzeing it up.) Warnier, in particular, is left stranded at sea level as the love interest. Aided by its physical clout, Summit Fever does hit a kind of rhythm near the end – but last year’s The Summit of the Gods is a more substantial look at this kind of obsession.