If the Oscar-winning sports doco Free Solo gave you a fresh fear of heights, you’ll want to avoid The Alpinist. Its trailer opens with Free Solo star Alex Honnold claiming that he’s intimidated by subject Marc-André Leclerc: “what I’m doing is on rock, and then I see Marc-André free-soloing on ice and snow.”
Chilling in more ways than one, The Alpinist is now screening in select Australian cinemas. It’s from the directors of The Dawn Wall and Valley Uprising, so if all these recent tales of mountainous derring-do have climbed into your heart and captivated your imagination, The Alpinist will be yet another must-see.
The Alpinist looks ominous from the get-go, with towering footage of frozen waterfalls and mountains most of us will only ever encounter on the label of an Evian bottle.
Leclerc is a different breed, however: he scares his peers and family, dropping off the radar to tackle seemingly-impossible climbs without any sense of fear or pride. He’s ridiculously modest after summiting one of the tallest peaks in the Americas, calling the climb “a really good day out”.
In his round-up of October’s most exciting cinematic releases, David Michael Brown highlighted just how unexpected Leclerc’s life-threatening hobby is: “the deafening silence and loneliness of his chosen sport is in stark contrast to the affable, dorky subject”.
Depending on your region’s COVID regulations and whether cinemas are open or not, you could be seeing The Alpinist on a dauntingly big screen soon: the vertigo-inducing doco arrived in Australian theatres on October 7.
