Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Editor’s Note: This story contains mentions of rape.

“The Ledge” is a new, self-described mystery film with a bold promise and scathing reviews.

The summary on Google seems to set up an epic adventure: an hour and a half of a brutal pursuit up the Dolomites, as a witness flees from the group of men who murdered her best friend soon after arriving. It sounds like a gripping tale, but despite the blood, sweat and tears that seem to have been poured into the project for about 15 minutes, the movie is entirely disappointing.

The villain of the story, Josh, will be discussed more in this article than our hero, Kelly — mainly because she seems to have the least amount of dialogue in the film. It’s not that she pulls the story forward through her actions instead of words. Essentially, all of our protagonist’s screen time is spent scaling rocks, dropping supplies she really needs and screaming, with one flashback scene with her late fiance that is replayed three or four times throughout the film and does not add any depth to her character, nor to her dead lover.

But in the beginning, she meets Josh and his gang of dudebros, who are also from the U.S. and have conveniently found themselves at the same Italian campsite as Kelly and her soon-to-be-dead friend Sophie. Right off the bat, Josh is shallow — both as a character and as a person. In the first five minutes of his screen time, he hits on the two girls with gross language, brags about his intimate life, attempts to rape Sophie and then punches her so that she falls off a cliff.

Any credit earned by his friends for stopping Josh from committing the first of his heinous acts in the film is revoked shortly thereafter, when it’s revealed that Josh has raped someone in the past. Yet his friends still hang around with him.

Sophie survives the fall from the cliff, but Josh goes down to finish the job and insists that each of his three friends smash her with a rock as well, so that they’re “equally guilty.” Kelly is hiding in a bush — not helping, just filming the murder — and lands right within her trope when she gives herself away with a scream. And thus starts the pursuit up the mountain: Kelly scales it alone, and is intercepted by Josh and his friends on — wait for it — a ledge.

Throughout the scene on the ledge, there is no character development. Josh’s friends continue to show resistance only behind his back, never directly to him. Before the friend group can go so far as to conspire, Josh successfully murders all of them, all while calling down to Kelly, who is camped beneath the ledge on the rocks.

He messages himself from Kelly’s phone, which she left behind, to tell himself that he’s attractive in a strange attempt to get under her skin. He repeatedly emphasizes to her the same point — “I’m still here, and I want to kill you.” Nevermind the fact that the repeated, empty threats and “suspense building” happen while the audience still has no clue why Kelly is climbing this mountain in the first place.

When the pursuit first started, why the hell did she grab her climbing gear and not her phone?

The dialogue of the movie is corny and meaningless. It raises the important societal problem of sexual assault, but fails to explore the depth and implications of it, serving only as the catalyst for a gross and evil man to continue being gross and evil until his unsatisfying demise, which was notably the least graphic of all the deaths in the movie.

A single drop of blood doesn’t emerge from Josh’s skin. All we see is him fall into oblivion, as if he didn’t deserve to be burned alive or smashed in the head with a hammer, like we saw him do to his supposed best friends who are suddenly disposable. You know, the ones that weren’t actually rapists and murderers.

Ultimately, “The Ledge” feels like it was thought of in 15 minutes, casted in a day, filmed in three and then released after a day of editing. Its synopsis on Google sets out a creative take on a story of pursuit, away from the stereotypical car chase. But in practice, it leaves much to be desired and a bad taste in the mouth.

Published on March 1, 2022 at 9:43 pm