This Indie Horror Film With Alex Honnold is About as Good As You’d Expect

The Sound is the sort of movie you might encounter if you fell asleep watching Syfy in the early 2000s, then woke up at 3:00 a.m. covered in Cheeto dust trying to figure out if you were still high or not.

In the film’s climax, two Indigenous warriors, clad in loincloths and wielding clubs, morph into cosmic fireballs and teleport onto a mountaintop to battle a CIA agent who has become possessed by a malignant alien living inside a meteorite.

I mention this not to spoil The Sound, but to give you an idea of what to expect.

The film’s premise is promising. The Sound follows a team of climbers attempting to make a first ascent of a remote rock spire that has been off-limits for decades, because something dangerous lives atop it. In reality, the bulk of the movie was filmed on the East Face of Liberty Bell, in Washington Pass, on several classics including Liberty Crack, Freedom or Death, and Thin Red Line.

From the film’s opening scene, shot on the Rainbow Wall in Red Rock, you can see that the climbing is authentic and well-captured. No Vertical Limit or Cliffhanger nonsense here. There are exceptions—such as the curious choice to have six climbers split up into teams of two, climb three separate but parallel lines up a face, then “converge” on the crux—but for the most part, the climbers in The Sound are climbing, placing protection, and belaying each other in a logical way. It’s an accurate portrayal of big wall free climbing, which is refreshing, and extremely rare to find outside of a documentary.

This authenticity is not that surprising. Early on, The Sound received buzz because it was billed to star a slew of professional rock climbers: Alex Honnold, Brette Harrington, Hazel Findlay, and Adrian Ballinger. This marketing irritated me, because those individuals are present for roughly five minutes in one scene at the beginning of the film, and are never seen again. Hollywood veteran William Fichtner, a character actor you’ll probably recognize from Prison Break and Black Hawk Down, is also said to “star” in this film, but appears only in passing. The other dude from Tenacious D (not Jack Black) also shows up via a Zoom call. Apparently he couldn’t be bothered to make it on set. I can fathom no reason why these actors were tapped for roles at all, except to bait-and-switch audiences.

The actual actors in this film are a string of up-and-comers. They do a decent job with what they’re given, and many of them are rock climbers in real life, which is cool. The most well known is Scott Bennett—a pro alpinist and big-waller with ascents of the Yosemite Triple Crown, El Cap Triple, and the Southeast Ridge of Cerro Torre—who has multiple speaking parts during the meat of the film.

The protagonist of The Sound, Sean, is a melancholic, misunderstood ex-free soloist, with hair constantly falling in his face and a chip on his shoulder because his grandfather died on the same mountain in 1959. Why this affects him so deeply is never clear. He couldn’t have known his grandfather. The man died at least three decades before Sean was born.

The yin to Sean’s yang is Colton, the team’s aggressively unlikeable leader. Colton is the sort of ex-mil macho, aviator-wearing nimrod that commercial mountaineers may think exist in the rock climbing world’s upper echelon. We’ve all encountered this heinous jagweed. He wears Black Rifle Coffee t-shirts, sprays women down at the gym, and climbs V2. “Make no mistake… I’m the boss!” Colton says at one point.

Comic relief is provided by a bearded, drug rug-wearing “tech support” guy who is always losing comms with the climbers, and a high-strung basecamp manager woman constantly yelling into the radio “Talk to me guys! What’s going on?” (An unconscionable amount of this film—I kid you not, probably 30 percent—entails people trying to get in touch with each other on radios and encountering static.)

There is a fine line between being honest and punching down, and I hope to walk it in this review. The authentic rock climbing is refreshing and well captured, but The Sound also has some seriously hackneyed writing, increasingly illogical plotting, and a creative direction that bit off more than it could chew. The dialogue, in particular, is often cringe-inducing.

There are a few semi-poignant conversations exploring the appeal of rock climbing and free soloing, but it’s nothing original. One sequence that does hit close to home is when the Indigenous tribe’s chieftain asks Sean to help vanquish the evil atop the mountain.

“What am I supposed to do?!” our hero pouts in response, jamming his hands in his pockets. “I’m just a rock climber.”

That tracks.

Watch the trailer of The Sound:

The film’s climax—a standoff-cum-WWE wrestling match that, judging from the gravity, seems to take place on the Moon—is a particular bummer, because it undercuts what legitimate tension is found in the earlier climbing sequences.

But when I communicated briefly with the film’s director, Brendan Devane, via email, he was candid about where he’d set the bar. “It’s just supposed to be a fun film that climbers can appreciate, and that non-climbers can follow along [with],” he told me. “We tried to make the climbing authentic as possible, and almost all of the actors are climbers as well. I’m old and my climbing days are behind me,” he added, “but it was a lot of fun to make.”

With this in mind, The Sound probably could have been a really good film. Honnold and the other rock legend cameos notwithstanding, veteran rigger-filmmakers like Cheyne Lempe, Dave Allfrey, and Brett Lowell, and producer Mike Negri (The Alpinist, Reel Rock) were also involved. The Sound clearly has the talent to portray rock climbing accurately and effectively. It just fails to realize that you don’t need monsters or aliens or demons or irritating quantities of radio static to make rock climbing anxiety-inducing.

The best scene in The Sound, where a leader goes around a bulge in the wall and disappears, his belayer unable to reach him and his rope going slack moments later, is genuinely harrowing, not because we suspect he’s been mind-flayed by a supernatural force, but because if you’re ever been on belay and lost touch with your partner, then you’ve experienced that mounting, paralyzing anxiety firsthand. Hell, even dropping a belay device is enough to turn a climbing trip into a horror movie. (The irony is that Devane seemed to recognize this, but just got lost somewhere along the way. In a behind the scenes interview he shared with me, he said he got the idea for The Sound while reading a review of Free Solo, which the reviewer called, “the best horror movie they’d ever seen.”)

All my snarky criticism notwithstanding, if I was you, I would go see this movie. The Sound might be a bit of a misfire, but it’s a misfire with heart. It takes itself a bit too seriously for my taste (I wish it had had the prescience to lean into its camp and amp up the hilarity, à la Sharknado), but still, how many films have you seen about big wall rock climbers fighting alien demonic possession?

These guys tried to do something fresh and unique, and I give them props. I’d also rather give them my cash than this year’s fiftieth Marvel movie, or A24’s increasingly pretentious slow burns. The Sound will open in select theaters and video on demand (VOD) on June 27. Devane has also partnered with a handful of climbing gyms around the country for screenings. If I were you, I’d pregame…

The post This Indie Horror Film With Alex Honnold is About as Good As You’d Expect appeared first on Climbing.