In 2023, a gondola carrying eight people — six of them teenagers on their way to school — got stuck 900 feet above a gorge in a mountainous region of Pakistan. Two of the three cables keeping their tram aloft snapped suddenly, leaving the people inside dangling by a tenuous thread. This horror, and the ragtag effort to end it, is documented in the new film Hanging by a Wire, from director Mohammed Ali Naqvi.
A mix of talking-head interviews, re-enactments, and actual footage of the harrowing event, Hanging by a Wire is styled in the manner of many other recent docu-thrillers, from Free Solo to The Rescue (both from directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin). Its crashing, keening (and, it must be said, overwrought) suspense music and ticking-clock title cards are clearly designed to give the film some commercial viability — which it might have, though I suspect it would be more of a streaming play than a theatrical one. Perhaps if the film was more polished, and had some added depth, it might feel more substantial. As is, Hanging by a Wire is a gripping story not told thoroughly enough.
Hanging by a Wire
A great rescue story, not very well told.
What works best in the film, as is often the case with movies such as this, is the stitching together of actual footage from the ordeal, both the fuzzy faraway phone videos and the stomach-plunging drone shots capturing these young men in staggering close-up as they sit precariously in the overturned gondola, waiting desperately for rescue. The stunning landscape surrounding them — verdant foothills in the foreground, snow-capped Himalayan massifs in the distance — heightens the surreality and loneliness of their experience, tiny figures suspended precariously amid the unforgiving majesty of the world.
I wish, though, that the audience was told a bit more about their individual lives, and about their community, the isolated population of a village tucked away in a high corner of northwest Pakistan. Naqvi gives us only a cursory lay of the land before rushing headlong into the unfolding disaster. The film, at a brisk 77 minutes, could afford to be more patient, to better set its scene so that we might feel a more personal connection to the various dramatis personae, and to the longstanding social and environmental conditions they were subject to on this most terribly eventful of days.
In interviews with a local cable car builder/rescue worker and with slightly self-congratulatory members of the police and military, it becomes clear that there is a class divide complicating some of the rescue efforts. A reporter alludes to the indifference that the Pakistani authorities might have had toward the situation — affecting a poor, disregarded rural enclave — had there not been international media coverage. But those dynamics are only glancingly addressed. Naqvi is too eager to get into the exhilarating adventure. That part is indeed heart-stopping — and involves some colorful characters, including a body-builder-cum-zipline-entrepreneur who sets out to be a hero — but it still craves proper context. Had Naqvi built to this risky, slapdash process more artfully, the film might have taken on truly epic scope.
What’s really missing are testimonies from the boys themselves, who only enter the picture toward the very end. There is a narrative reason for this — Navqi wants to keep us nervous about their fate — but withholding their individuality from the film just for the sake of suspense ends up playing a little cheap, and robs us of a no-doubt grueling and compelling hour-by-hour retelling of what it was to teeter on the brink of death for so long. This is a survival story without much of an account from the survivors themselves. Maybe the boys did not wish to relive that ordeal in agonizing detail, but Hanging by a Wire suffers from that lack. It wants, and perhaps needs, their voices.
Still, there is enough visceral stuff in the movie to make it an engaging sit, a dreadful then cathartic palate cleanser between dark and dreary (or effortfully twee) Sundance fare. We encounter some interesting figures, gawp at the dazzling terrain, and feel at least some swell of inspiration at seeing people band together to make a miracle happen. That counts for something these days, at least.
