Pakistan<\/a> in 2023, when a wire on the cable car they were travelling on broke, is a pretty conventional example of the form. For obvious reasons, no one tries to recreate the situation, but since it was quite recent there is no shortage of news footage and amateur clips to fill out the particulars. The downside of doing a story that\u2019s so recent is that some of the audience may remember what happened anyway, but still there\u2019s plenty of nail-nibbling suspense here, and sequences that will give anyone with acrophobia the heebie jeebies \u2013 especially the drone shots that zoom close on the terrified faces of those trapped inside the dangling car.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nCredit is due to director Mohammed Ali Naqvi for pulling it all together adeptly, as well as to the seamless editing by William Grayson that nourishes the suspense and draws out some of the surprising moments of comedy. It\u2019s good to have a bit of a giggle amid all the tension; we meet one heroic zip line enthusiast who brags about his amazing body as he struts around the gym he runs, looking buff but not outrageously so. The fact that he\u2019s introduced halfway through the story lets us know he\u2019ll survive, as will his best buddy, who has a lot less braggadocio.<\/p>\n
At one point, the two of them are surprised to find a third would-be rescuer on top of the precarious cable car and they all get into an argument while the people inside hurl insults at them (correctly) for putting more strain on the already frayed cables. Indeed, the one thing the film doesn\u2019t do \u2013 which an American or British movie would probably go big on \u2013 is investigate the safety failures that allowed all this to happen. Instead, the Pakistani interviewees just take it as bad luck that, for example, the army didn\u2019t have any working walkie-talkies when they first showed up, just some of the kit that might have sped up the rescue effort.<\/p>\n
Hanging By a Wire is in UK cinemas from 28 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Survival documentaries are a weird little genre of nonfiction film-making that recount the stories of accidents and natural…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":826329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-826328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}