"Elementary"

16 December 2021

3 mins

On the climb.

This two-and-a-half minute glimpse into the exploits of Hackney-born climber and model Eugenie Lee is a stunning piece of film. It opens with an exploration of Lee's restlessness, giving us an insight into her motivation for tackling such a hazardous endeavour. Her stilting voiceover is mixed with a growling soundbed which arouses your intrigue, and the leap from an empty office building to a cave with matching columns is a confident introduction to the director's mastery... and that's just the first twenty seconds.

Lee replaces the bombardment of WhatsApp messages with an activity which demands the fullest attention possible, because the climb up the cliffs of the Jurassic coast in Dorset looks sufficiently hazardous that this enterprise could have ended up being investigated by David Tennant and Olivia Colman in a fourth series of 'Broadchurch'.

Felix Brady doesn't allow the level of energetic strangeness to drop for a second and makes brilliant use of the technology at his disposal. A drone ride along the coast spins up towards the cliff in a dizzying fashion to underline the manifest dangers faced by the intrepid climber. And intimacy is provided by footage from a Panavision minicam (with 4mm wide lenses) which capture Lee's fingers as they search for a handhold.

It's great to see a film where everything has been thrown at the project... and it works. This could so easily have been bogged down by the multiplicity of techniques used to capture the adventure, but instead they've been pulled together mightily well. You're left wanting to learn about Eugenie Lee, and to see more of the world through Felix Brady's lens.

UK

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