FrightFest review – Zip Wire

FrightFest review – Zip Wire

Director Howard J. Ford and writer Tom Boyle made The Ledge, a FrightFest selection which was all about hanging off a mountainside.  This one is is all about dangling from a wire half a mile above ground.  There is actually quite a bit of plot to explain this, but – as with Fall (2022) – this is basically a vertigosploitation film designed to dampen your palms as poor MyAnna Buring and nasty Joseph Milson hang in there for an hour or so.

It opens in media res with OCD-suffering medical researcher Amy Watson (Buring) and her normie friend Chloe (Silvia Presante) pursued on a mountain and forced to attempt an escape via an ill-maintained WWI-era zipline.  Then, when the two women get stuck half-way, it flashes back to multiple set-up scenes involving a possible cure for cancer, a home invasion, a murdered boyfriend (Michael Amariah) who inconveniently wanted his ashes spread at a mountain shrine (Amy can’t even stand being in a lift, let alone up a mountain), a scientific breakthrough written in an uncrackable code, and a big pharma conspiracy.  Saffron Burrows appears in the flashbacks as a friendly, caring big pharma exec so there’s no need to be suspicious of her – though it’s a certainty she’ll be back in the present-day story near the end for some reason or other.  Chloe persuades Amy to carry out the dead guy’s wish and a guide (Michael Fatogun) and some nice tourists (Millson, Helen Hill) offer to take them to the shrine … which is obviously a trick to subject iffy-with-heights Amy to her worst nightmare in order to get her to cough up the code.

It comes up with an impressive range of different perils which can affect someone hanging from an old zip wire, including lightning, dodgy carabiniers, industrial spies who think their minions in James Bond movies, hand injuries, a too-tight harness which cuts off circulation and the existential terror of looking down.  My grandmother once told me that if I fell out of a window I’d be a skeleton by the time I hit the ground – I’m sure she meant well, but I remember that sixty years later – and Millson gives an only slightly less alarming lecture on the effects on the human body of falling from a great height.  There are a lot of familiar elements here, all strung together – hah! – on that line … and some ropey – also, hah! – looking effects shots don’t entirely detract from the suspense, though it’s not just a relief for vertigo-sufferers when the survivors get off the line after an hour or so and get one with other business on firmish ground.  A few moments of oh-come-on-now contrivance – like the vital notebook which is dropped from half a mile up but is found within thirty seconds of scouting on the ground – will draw groans rather than gasps.