Ray Pride

Don't even get me started on my acrophobia. There are adventures in the wild that I understand, but mountain climbing, no matter how it's depicted, has never struck me as the great wild exploit it's held to be. Dehydration, disfigurement and death, that's what's always come to mind. There's a full menu of same in Kevin Macdonald's "Touching the Void," based on Joe Simpson's book about his experiences in 1985 when he and Simon Yates foolishly braved the only mountain in the Peruvian range that hadn't been scaled. They moved upward in the fleet, unencumbered Alpine style, with no backup. Three-and-a-half days in, the worst possible disaster happened, with Simpson falling and smashing his leg. Macdonald, whose work includes the 2000 Oscar-winning documentary, "One Day in September" and a memoir of his grandfather's achievements, "Emeric Pressburger: the Life and Death of a Screenwriter," works in a by-the-throat style, mingling latter-day interviews with Simpson and Yates with recreations in Peru and the Alps. Actors retrace their steps, their follies, their near-death experiences. And although you see Simpson and Yates, years after their tortuous days spent in their mid-twenties, the recreations manage to capture the sensations and fear in a way that full-on fiction or a "purer" form of documentary never could. It's an icy thrill. 106m.

"Touching the Void" opens Friday at Pipers Alley.

(2004-02-03)

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