This film brings together two incredibly tense points, not only the fact that you are climbing a sheer rock face with no protection and could fall and die at any time, but also trying to evade the killers that killed your best friend and are hunting you down.

The Ledge follows two women who go off to a mountain range to climb the face of the mountain. These two women are called Kelly and Sophie, Kelly has more reason to do this trip than her friend due to the fact that it is the anniversary of when her boyfriend and could’ve been fiance died doing the exact same trek. However the two women meet a group of men who are also there to climb the mountain, but are not as experienced as these women, and soon these men turn out to be a lot worse than they first seem.

One of the men, Josh, seems to have a lot of personal issues and anger management problems. He is literally seen as the bad guy and that is his whole story, he has no inner conflict or worries about killing people, he just does whatever he wants to do with no consequence. And Kelly, the main girl is seen as a good character, where she has gone through hardship and sadness but she is fundamentally good and clearly does not have a bad bone in her body. While the other characters are a bit more grey in their personalities these two are literally good and bad and that makes for quite a simple storyline because you know what’s going to happen because they’re so cookie-cutter.

We see throughout the film that these men have clearly committed crimes previously in their lives and that is what has bonded them together into their adulthood, and the fact that they are so willing to kill off Sophie early on in the film – which starts the whole plot conflict – is really over the top and strange. Yes in that moment they are very drunk and high so are not thinking straight but this is why I say this is such a good vs evil film, because they don’t even give it a second thought and just go with it. Plus the fact that Josh just keeps killing off more characters, it’s like he has a taste of blood and can’t help himself, and this almost made it comical because you knew what was going to happen and it was just waiting game of what ridiculous way he was going to go about it.

Now of course I have a lot of negative points to say about this film but it was interesting, the suspense and excitement was there. Watching Kelly climb this rock face knowing it’s over 10,000 m tall and she has no help, no climbing equipment and she even loses her water bottle at one point is incredibly terrifying. But pair that with the fact that she’s also running for her life is very tense and exciting. I will say it is a bit simplistic and if these people had more to them and deeper character development, especially as there’s only six in the whole film, you could really delve into who these people are on the good and bad side and maybe feel some resentment towards Kelly and what’s happening to her, as well as maybe some compassion for Josh and his friends, yet because they’re so simplistic you don’t.

I would recommend this film because it’s a very easy watch, it’s less than an hour and a half long and it does have an interesting storyline, I just wish they could dive deeper into the characters themselves and gave us more to work with. I don’t want it to be a good versus evil storyline, I want these characters to have some depth and issues within themselves that causes the audience to not side so quickly with one or the other. if you want a suspense film that is different to others you may have seen before then I highly recommend it because it is just that, I just wanted more from it.

What do you think of The Ledge?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding