Torn – Movie Review
92 Minutes, Unrated
Directed by Max Lowe
**NOTE: this post will be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, enjoy this brief look at my thoughts. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
Widely hailed as the greatest mountaineer of his generation, Alex Lowe was a towering figure in the world of outdoor sports. But he loomed even larger for his oldest son, Max, who was only 11 in 1999 when Alex was buried by an avalanche along with cameraman David Bridges while attempting to ski the north face of Mount Shishapangma in the Tibetan Himalaya.
Seventeen years after their deaths, Lowe’s and Bridges’ bodies were found by two climbers attempting the same route, and in the following months, Lowe’s family journeyed to the remote mountain to recover them. In the powerful and deeply moving new documentary TORN, director Max Lowe examines the long-buried feelings this unearthed for him and his family, including his mother, Jennifer; his younger brothers, Sam and Isaac; and his stepfather, Conrad Anker, Alex’s climbing partner and best friend.
It seems as though the last couple years have brought us some really incredible climbing documentaries, from Free Solo, to 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible, and last year’s really great film The Alpinist.
But the mountain climbing world wasn’t always a high-visibility sport prevalent in the public’s consciousness. Until recently, it took a tragedy to bring the sport into focus, and those tragedies were always deaths, and always on mountains like Everest or K2.
Worse still, the documentary work until know has mostly focused on climbers as they attempt a single, monumental climb, or a series of climbs. All-too-often, though, those attempts end in the aforementioned tragedy.
Torn gives us a different look at the climbing community through the lens of Alex Lowe, who left behind a wife and three sons when he died in that avalanche.
How, then, does a family (both physical and spiritual) recover from such a tragedy? How do they–can they–move on and live their lives?
This is the unspoken part of the tragedy, the bit we never get to see, and Torn presents it to us as what it is: the story of a son trying to make sense of his life after the loss of this father, while the rest of his family moves forward.
How does his father’s best friend reconcile his guilt for surviving that same avalanche, for coming to love and eventually marry that same friend’s widow and raise his sons as his own?
That’s what makes Torn exceptional: not visually stunning cinematography of expansive mountain vistas, but of quiet contemplation of what it all means. Life, death, love, grief, acceptance… all of it.
Torn will open in theaters on January 7.
Torn features Conrad Anker, Jennifer Lowe, Max Lowe, Alex Lowe, and Isaac Lowe.
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