‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’: Sundance Review

Dir. Jeff Zimbalist. US. 2024. 100mins

In as much as it uses hand-held camera and drone footage to capture the exploits of a pair of ‘roof toppers’ – freeform climbers who illegally scale the world’s highest buildings without safety mechanisms to capture pictures and footage of themselves to post on social media – Skywalkers: A Love Story is terrifying. If you wanted to look over the precipice without looking over the precipice, this is your film.

 Virtuoso of vertigo

Premiering at Sundance, it’s a continuation of films from Man On Wire to The Deepest Breath (which bowed last year in this spot). It’s so of-the-moment and ‘real’, though, that it’s curiously terrifying on another level too. The central Russian roof toppers, Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, are all about the camera, documenting every moment of their lives: without rigorous interrogation, such fly on the wall documentary-making in the Instagram age can risk feeling as image-obsessed as the app itself, even at these nauseating extremes.

The cheap thrills of Skywalkers – it literally costs the young couple nothing to risk their lives in this way, and their lives mean very little to them – should easily see this virtuoso of vertigo secure a berth on a streaming platform and generate the headlines this real-life couple live for (she calls herself an ‘extreme model’).  As far as documentary film-making goes, though, it’s problematic and, unlike its antecedents, will most likely screen wide as opposed to high. 

A painfully clunky but ever-present voiceover by the couple frames the story they want it contructed. It is set up from the start to climax on the spire of Merdeka 118 in Malaysia, as a doc-thriller where Ivan and Angela will revive their careers by selling NFTs of a sky-high pas-de-deux and sort out their trust issues. All director and more pertinently editor Jeff Zimbalist has to do is make you care about their fate, even when they are not so sure.

He starts by tracking the couple through the Russian rooftop community, which is surprisingly large. She is the gymnast daughter of divorced circus trapeze artists, brought up in the Big Top. With a depressed mother and absent father, she sets out for Moscow determined to be independent. Ivan, meantime, is the ‘baddest roofer in all of Russia’ and from a clearly more comfortable and loving background. He’s cool and professional; she’s beautiful and artistic. Sparks fly when they meet, and they quickly become a couple, photographing themselves on top of buildings around the world (a troublingly disproportionate amount of shots are taken in the densely-crowded Hong Kong, Shanghai, Macao.)

Zimbalist is in thrall to the couple or, more importantly, their camera, go-pro and drone footage: it’s a filmmaking trio. There is not much of a sense of editorial distance or inquiry. Zimbalist himself once scaled roofs, so he understands, perhaps better than most, the thrills of this extreme pursuit. As a director, he is a facilitator for the story/reel they have sculpted around the shots. They live their whole lives on one camera or another. Although Skywalkers races to a pacy thriller-like climax, it’s hard not to see it as contrived. (A moment of epiphany at a Malaysian circus is just one of many where Angela’s emotions seem particularly available for ‘reality’ shots.)

Zimbalist’s film is all about the highs: at no point will it dig deep. There is zero sense of perspective past the obvious. Ukraine gets scant mention. At one point we hear that Angela’s old crew are all dead. Why are so many Russians falling off roof tops? She has several sudden attacks of vertigo and it is clear she is a much more troubled individual than her partner. Should someone step in to help? Are they narcissists? Is a payment of Euros 500 to risk her life in a thong on a rooftop in Tianjin the going rate, and what is the market apart from the Insta ‘like’ brigade, hashtag yougogirl, for this art?  

But Skywalkers: A Love Story mostly cares about the shots. It’s clear that, despite their denials, the couple is hooked on adrenaline to varying degrees and not, as Angela says, “a commitment to self-growth” . As the pace tightens and Zimbalist swerves between grainy infra-red footage, audiences will certainly experience that drug, voyeurs of a sport that’s all for show. It’s a tragically cheap thrill.