‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’ Review: A Thrilling, Vertigo-Inducing Documentary That Scales the Heights of Fear and Devotion

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Skywalkers: A Love Story” lends new meaning to the words “high anxiety.” It’s a documentary set in the world of rooftoopers, the new generation of daredevils who scale the tallest buildings they can find, climbing to the tips of skyscrapers and posting top-of-the-world footage of themselves on social media.

Directed by Jeff Zimbalist (a former rooftopper himself), the film is brilliantly edited, and it’s full of amazing, terrifying, transfixing verité shots of figures walking on girders, sprawling on ledges, and scaling the spindly, often curved spires that shoot out of the tops of buildings, consisting up close of ladders in the form of precarious slats.

The movie puts us right up there with these outlaw thrill-seekers, and even if you don’t happen to possess a fear of heights, the images have so much vicarious vividness that you may tilt your head ever so slightly one way or another, trying to keep “yourself” from falling.

Even if you do have a fear of heights (Exhibit A: this critic), the film has a hold-onto-your-armrest exhilaration. Most of the sky-high footage was shot, by the climbers themselves, with cameras held by selfie sticks, and the images have a dizzying wide-angle clarity that only heightens the “Woah!” factor of it all.