Tright here’s an eerie closeup in Summit Fever of hair emerging at the wrist of lead persona Michael (Freddie Thorp), previous to a lightning strike. Julian Gilbey’s climbing drama isn’t simply visually resplendent, it additionally has an outstanding tactile familiarity with its milieu – hanging its actors on genuine rock faces at the Eiger, Matterhorn and Mont Blanc mountains – that ends up in super-authentic hiking sequences (no less than to this non-climber). Too unhealthy then that it fumbles its dramatic handholds with a risible sub-Level Damage storyline about peak-scaling habit.

Thorp performs a Keanu-esque novice who has hand over his finance process to chase the Chamonix dream. Egged on through his loudmouth hiking spouse JP (Michel Biel), Michael begins to push his limits at the area’s slopes, beginning with the terrifyingly sheer Dent du Géant. And, in spite of first of all being whipping boy for weathered American Leo (Ryan Phillippe), he suits proper in with the younger, dumb and filled with kombucha hip native scene – together with a budding hookup with piste-bashing French ski information Isabelle (Mathilde Warnier).

The hiking sequences are really exhilarating: in huge drone photographs homing in on minuscule figures on rock faces and in blow-by-blow crag-side set items that reveal the film-makers know whereof they talk (even with the strange low-budget shortcoming, reminiscent of suspiciously light-looking boulders). And with lightning backlighting alpine vistas within the ultimate typhoon series, you are feeling proper along the climbers in some way that even Hollywood big-hitters reminiscent of 2015’s Everest battle with.

Best possible now not glance down on the tale, although, which would possibly had been in a position to rise up the cliched theme of adrenalised hubris if it hadn’t painted it so cartoonishly. Even the movie’s knowledgeable unfastened solo climber is at one second lecturing about respecting the mountain, then arrogantly dynoing two seconds later. (Cue additional philosophical finger-wagging from Phillippe, Swayzeing it up.) Warnier, particularly, is left stranded at sea degree as the affection pastime. Aided through its bodily clout, Summit Fever does hit one of those rhythm close to the top – however remaining 12 months’s The Summit of the Gods is a extra really extensive have a look at this type of obsession.