Once Stölzl's plot starts rolling, however, he can't sustain those early political overtones; there's simply no place for them in this otherwise old-fashioned tale of love, loyalty, and sacrifice in the context of a survivalist drama. When the challenge goes out to Europe's alpinists to be the first to scale the Eiger's north face - a glowering wall of sheer ice - the strapping, classically Germanic über-climbers Toni (Benno Fürmann ) and Andi (Florian Lukas) take up the gauntlet eagerly as Germany's contingent. Smelling a juicy story, Henry (Ulrich Tukur), the philistine editor of a Berlin newspaper, dispatches plucky neophyte photographer Luise (Johanna Wokelek) to capture the event. Luise, it turns out, hails from the same hometown as Toni and Andi. What's more, she and Toni were one-time sweethearts. As the pining, wounded looks they exchange upon meeting tell us, they still carry a torch for each other.
North Face becomes less and less the exultant action-adventure of its opening to resemble a kind of slow-burn torture mechanism as Toni and Andi, together with Austrian rivals-turned-reluctant partners Willy and Edi (Simon Schwarz and Georg Friedrich), realize that conquering the Eiger pales next to the imminent horror that awaits them in getting back down. The climbers' day-to-day crucible is set against the more inane sparring between Luise and Henry; much to his photographer's chagrin, the latter gets lathered up over the potential profits to be reaped from the mountaineers' possible victory, forsaking any concern for their safety. The sentiments expressed between them are obvious (Luise: 'Are you human?' Henry: 'From time to time,' etc.) to the point of corniness, more befitting a sappy UFA-era melodrama. Just as corny is the script's attempt at generating romantic heat between Luise and Toni, a la Titanic. It fails utterly: The two lack chemistry and, as it is, share hardly more than a few scenes together, most of them involving Toni frost bitten, half-conscious, and hanging precariously on a rope while Luise looks on in terror.
As Stölzl's story snowballs into its third act of mounting tragedies, the question of whether Toni and Luise will share a future together feels all but irrelevant as a grim sense of fatalism takes over story. But because Stölzl and his screenwriters neglect to provide adequate depth and inner life for their main characters, that fatalism spells doom for the movie as a whole . When the climbers' fate goes from bad to worse, our horror is more a sympathy reflex than a sign of any actual concern.
What Stölzl does provide are mountaineering sequences of razor-edged suspense - as good as any such scenes ever put on film (Touching the Void being the best recent example). But for all the tension-fraught, high-altitude rappelling and cliffhanging, the screenplay has little to counterweigh its commitment to historical truth, making this journey up the North Face little more than a despairing slog.
Aka Nordwand.
Climb every mountain.
