'North Face' Movie Review

Why You Should Actually Watch This

Most mountain movies cheat. They cut to a sweeping drone shot when things get hard. They give you a triumphant hand-on-summit moment before the credits. North Face does neither. It puts two young men on the most feared rock face in Europe, drops a storm on them, and then refuses to look away while everything goes wrong, slowly, over three days.

The mountain in question is the Eiger. Eiger is German for "ogre," which feels about right. Its north face had a nickname locally, Mordwand, or "Murder Wall," because too many climbers had already died trying it. By 1936 it was the last major unclimbed face in the Alps, and Nazi propaganda had decided it was Germany's job to plant a flag on it before the Berlin Olympics. Two Bavarian climbers, Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser, decided to give it a shot. They picked up two Austrians along the way. None of them came home.

That's not really a spoiler. It's the historical record, and the film knows you can Google it. It still finds a way to make every minute on the wall feel like the rope is one breath away from giving.

The Real Story Underneath

If you want to understand why this movie hits the way it does, it helps to know what actually happened. Hinterstoisser pioneered a brilliant move on the ascent. A tension traverse across a blank slab of rock that's now literally named after him on the Eiger. Then he pulled the fixed rope down behind him. When the weather turned and the climbers had to retreat, that traverse became uncrossable. Toni Kurz ended up hanging on a rope alone in the storm for hours, talking to rescuers who could see him but couldn't quite reach him. He died of cold and exhaustion within a few metres of safety. He was 23.

Stölzl doesn't sentimentalise any of this. He doesn't have to. The facts are doing all the work.

The Cast Doing The Climbing

Benno Fürmann plays Toni Kurz like a man who knows he's already lost an argument with the mountain. He's quiet, stubborn, in love with the climb in a way that has nothing to do with glory. Fürmann had been a leading man in German cinema for a decade before this (Joyeux Noël, Tom Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior), and he's also, weirdly, the German dub voice of Puss in Boots in the Shrek movies, which has nothing to do with anything but is delightful. Here he gives the film its centre of gravity.

Florian Lukas, who international audiences might recognise from Good Bye, Lenin!, plays Hinterstoisser with a lighter, more reckless energy. He's the one who'll try the bolder line. Their friendship is the engine of the whole thing, and it works because neither actor is performing camaraderie. They just look like two guys who've known each other since they were kids.

Johanna Wokalek, the Austrian actress, plays Luise, the journalist covering the climb from the hotel below. She's stuck in a slightly underwritten role (more on that), but she sells the helplessness of being able to see someone you love through a telescope and not being able to do a thing about it. Ulrich Tukur plays the Nazi-friendly newspaper editor, and Tukur is always great at playing men who smile slightly too much.

What Doesn't Quite Land

The film has a third in the valley and two-thirds on the mountain, and the valley third is the weaker one. The romance between Luise and Toni gets the standard soft-focus treatment, the propaganda angle is sketched in but not really wrestled with, and you can feel the script working overtime to make sure you understand the political stakes, which don't really need underlining once the storm hits.

There's also a moment late on where Luise heroically appears at a high cliff viewpoint in the middle of a blizzard, and that's the one beat that pushes from "based on a true story" into "based on what would make the trailer cut better." Some critics have called this the film's biggest cheat. Fair enough. Once the climb starts, though, almost none of this matters.

The Cold Was Real, Mostly

A lot of what's on screen was actually shot on the Eiger itself, in real snowstorms. Stölzl was committed to that bit. For the most claustrophobic sequences (including the bivouac, where the climbers strap themselves to the rock face and try to sleep through a blizzard) the production built a set inside an industrial freezer kept at minus fifteen degrees Celsius. CGI is in there but used sparingly enough that you don't really notice. The weather is doing the work. The actors' lips stop moving right. That isn't acting.

Stölzl came up through opera staging and music videos before this. He directed the videos for Madonna's "American Pie" and Evanescence's "Going Under." None of that prepares you for this film. He'd go on to direct Young Goethe in Love and The Physician, and neither of those prepares you for it either. North Face is the one that feels personal.

The cinematography is by Kolja Brandt, and he won the German Film Critics Award for it. He deserved it. Watch how he frames the Eiger from the hotel terrace versus how he frames it from the wall. Those are two completely different mountains, and the film is quietly about that, about how the well-fed people in the valley don't understand what they're looking at.

Things To Look Out For

Watch for the cake. There's a scene where hotel guests are served a dessert sculpted to look like the Eiger, while four men freeze a few hundred metres above them. It's the cleanest, most furious image in the film, and Stölzl shoots it like a normal scene, which is what makes it work.

Watch the very first scene too. It's a fake Nazi newsreel about an earlier failed Eiger attempt, and the voice-over actually gets the dead climbers' first names wrong. Easy to miss. Almost certainly intentional. The film is telling you in the first thirty seconds exactly how trustworthy the propaganda machine was.

And listen. The sound design won the German Film Award in Gold and you'll get why. The hammer-on-piton rhythm becomes the score in places. You'll still be hearing it the next day.