This Soaring Documentary on Women's Rock Climbing Is a Netflix Must-Watch

My climbing experience is limited to preteen birthday parties in gyms reeking of palm sweat and stale granola bars. But as I watched the four elite female athletes featured in The Wall: Climb For Gold sprint like spider monkeys up bizarrely contorted walls, I found myself doing the same thing my childhood friends did when I got stuck clinging to a tiny nub, frozen and useless 20 feet in the air. From the comfort of my couch, I hollered, "Just put your foot up!"

But this documentary, initially released in January and coming to Netflix on Sunday, May 1, quickly shows climbing is a lot more complicated than that. To quote Shauna Coxsey, one of the featured climbers: "You have no fucking idea what is going on."

Helmed by Formula 1: Drive to Survive director Nick Hardie, The Wall: Climb For Gold follows four women from around the world starting in 2019 as they vie for a spot in the very first Olympics climbing competition. They're tasked with mounting massive indoor structures dotted with pegs that look impossible to grasp -- sometimes without even a rope keeping them aloft. We're shown an intimate glimpse of the physical and psychological hurdles faced by Great Britain's Coxsey, Slovenia's Janja Garnbret, US climber Brooke Raboutou and Japan's Miho Nonaka as they navigate training, injuries and psychological struggles made even worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The Wall seamlessly ushers us between the four countries. It manages this feat by providing us with a profound sense of place via stunning aerial shots: cliffs looming in the wilderness, Tokyo sprawling beneath Mount Fuji, climbers scaling gigantic spotlighted walls before a roaring crowd. By way of closeups, it distills all that pressure on the  humans experiencing it: White chalk coating the fingers, tensed hands gripping the climbing holds. Frequent shifts in mood, pacing and visual style make us viscerally feel the contrast at the heart of the film: the golden glory of competition and victory, and the stark isolation of the gym where 99% of the Olympic lifestyle is actually spent.

As the four women surmount challenge after challenge, old home videos clue us in to the childhoods that got them to this point. A little girl shimmying up a door frame and doing wild flips. The first pair of secondhand climbing shoes. A father's arms stretched out to catch his daughter should the burgeoning boulderer take a plunge. 

Watching the parents is equally as fascinating. One family wails in agony as another across the world jumps for joy. (I can hardly fathom the pride and nerves you'd feel sitting in a stadium and watching your kid compete for Olympic gold. Let alone during a pandemic that forces you to cheer them on from behind a TV screen.)

With their sculpted muscles and beguiling agility, these athletes seem invincible. But they're battered over and over with constant, suffocating stress. From feeling you owe the world perfection, to missing out on normal life, to grappling with the very real possibility of messing up on the big day — climbing is as much a mental battle as it is physical. Throw in a yearlong delay and the uncertainty of the pandemic, and it's a recipe for psychological havoc.

Even so, The Wall is a story of remarkable resilience. Going into this sports documentary, I was expecting, well, a sports documentary. And, yes, it provided all the nail-biting suspense and adrenaline rushes one could desire. But Hardie's film succeeds in showing us the human beings beneath the spotlights. At their core, these are women who just really, really love to climb up rocks.

P.S. Nainita Desai, the composer behind the film's epic yet refined score, deserves a nod. And an award! Warning: The soundtrack is so motivating, it may compel you to start scaling vast vertical surfaces.