Hanging on for dear life in Philipp Stölz’s mountaineering thriller. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

NOT SINCE Touching the Void has such an edge-of-your-seat and nerve-shattering mountaineering film been committed to celluloid. And like that feature, director Philipp Stölz’s North Face is based (rather loosely I imagine) on a true story. It’s 1936 Germany and with the Olympic Games close at hand the Nazi party is lusting after new Aryan idols. Climbers from all over Europe head for the unconqured north face of the Eiger, in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps. The first to the top will be presented with gold medals.

Among the climbers are Bavarians Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andi Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas). When the flag-waving editor of the Berliner Zeitung, Henry Arau (Ulrich Tukur), discovers his intern Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek also in The Baader Meinhof Complex) is a school friend and possible former flame of Kurz, he scents a propagandist story for the Fatherland. The two newspaper staff set of in tow.

Eschewing Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger posing, Fürmann and Lukas play their characters with a vulnerable authenticity. When their wiry frames inch up vertical shelves of ice, you believe it. However, it’s the Swiss landscape, and Eiger in particular, that is the film’s towering star. The north face is as stunningly beautiful as it is terrifying. The large number of climbers who have died while scaling the mountainside have earned it the epithet, Mordwand, or Murder Wall, a play on the face’s German name Nordwand. So when Kurz and Hinterstoisser – with an Austrian team tailing them – set off with scant equipment and the weather setting in, we know this will be no walk in the park. Pretty soon the frostbitten climbers are fighting for survival as they’re battered at every angle by unremitting elements.

Stölz has the good sense to provide viewers with relief from the brutal tension of the climb by juxtaposing it with the bourgeois excess of guests gathered in a chateau below. This also serves as an opportunity to explore Nazi Germany’s ideological exploitation of the mountaineers and the hagiography of human sacrifice – though the film breaks no new ground here. Arau remarks that only a great success or great tragedy will make the headlines. He’s happy to see either.

And if the film’s political and romantic plots fail to scale heights of epicness, the success of North Face is visceral. With a background in advertising and opera, Stölz assault on the senses is technically assured and so utterly immersive you won’t know where the two-hour running time has gone. Another notable entry from the new-wave of German filmmakers, North Face is the sort of palm-moistening and head-spinning experience that cries out to be seen on the big screen.