Skywalkers: A Love Story
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Documentary
Directors: Jeff Zimbalist, Maria Bukhonina
Streaming on Netflix. Reviewed at the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival.
People do stupid things, and I don’t just mean covertly climbing to the tippy top of the world’s tallest buildings just so you can take a selfie of yourself dangling a quarter-mile above the pavement.
Still, let’s talk about those particular people, because such is the obsession — and curious career choice — of the attractive young couple at the center of this dizzying, death-defying documentary.
Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus are, it is clear, made for each other. Separately, in the mid-2010s, the Russian daredevils became two of the Internet’s premier rooftoppers — collecting viewers (and, most importantly, sponsors) by presenting images and movies of themselves balancing on impossibly narrow beams and precariously pointed towers atop ridiculously tall buildings around the world.
One day in the late 2010s, one of Beerkus’s sponsors suggested he find himself a woman companion — all the better to draw eyes on Instagram and TikTok, where the only thing more appealing than a hunky guy doing splits 1,000 feet up is a hunky guy lifting above his head a scantily clad female doing splits 1,000 feet up.
It is around the time that Beerkus and Nikolau hook up (purely professionally, at least at first) that co-director Jeff Zimbalist catches up with them. The pair quickly settle on a routine: scouting out possible aeries, devising ways to elude security forces, and tracing possible vertical routes to the top. Finally, at the literal pinnacle of success, they immortalize their feats with compelling, gravity-defying imagery for all the digital world to see.
Somewhere along the way — the movie isn’t clear precisely when — the pair become something more than partners in high-flying crime. Now romantically entwined, they start creating precarious poses that are increasingly romantic — borderline erotic — adding sizzle to their high-stakes antics.
But time is always of the essence: To rooftoppers, there’s little glory in scaling a previously conquered building. If you can’t be the first, there is really no point in even trying. Thus, Beerkus and Nikolau nearly always find themselves clambering up the skeletons of structures that are still under construction, masterminding Mission: Impossible-like schemes that rely on perfect timing and near-invisibility.
Co-director Zimbalist offers plenty of fly-on-the-wall moments, peering over the pair’s shoulders as they study photographs and architectural drawings in preparation for their next conquest. But Skywalkers really comes alive when the two, fitted with GoPro cameras and high-def drones, reach their objectives. There is undeniable poetry not only to the swooping drone shots, but also in the provocative poses the pair seem to instinctively create.
As the two embrace, kiss, and canoodle with acrobatic abandon, Zimbalist employs every visual tool at his disposal to convey a sentiment worthy of — and about as subtle as — a Hallmark card: Love is a balancing act, and a potentially deadly one, at that.
The notion plays out on the ground, as well: After a few years of daring the heights together, Beerkus and Nikolau begin getting on each other’s nerves. They bicker about routes to the top. They question each other’s commitment to the “art” they believe they are creating.
It’s all pretty typical relationship stuff. But when you and your partner happen to be tied to a profession in which you literally hold each other’s lives in your hands, “I’m going home to mother” doesn’t quite cut it.
Finally, the two decide to go their separate ways, lest they suffer a falling out of a more drastic sort.
Some months later, though, they discover a reason to get the old band back together: The window is rapidly closing on any chance for anyone to scale the soon-to-be-completed, 2,227-foot-high Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur. Several climbers have already tried and been apprehended by the government, which seemingly does not believe in “victimless” crime: You can go to prison for 20 years just for being gay.
The final third of the film involves the pair’s elaborate plan to conquer the tower and the harrowing ascent itself, which involves more than a day hiding in a cramped closet while hard-hatted workers bustle around them.
Can love conquer all, including gravity and surveillance cameras? The fact that Beerkus and Nikolau are still here to tell their tale is the ultimate spoiler—although, as co-director Zimbalist told me following a screening at Telluride’s Mountainfilm Festival, “They can’t ever go back to Kuala Lumpur again.”
In a world where reality TV offers up manufactured conflicts and fake breakups as frequent as commercial breaks, it’s hard to know how much of the human drama in Skywalkers is real or staged. Zimbalist, though, is a serious documentarian (The Two Escobars, How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer), so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Still, what the director cannot overcome is the oxygen-sucking narcissism of his subjects, whose entire sense of self-worth seems to lie in how many eyeballs have been attracted to their latest exploit. Scrolling through a phone message that reveals that all of her former climbing pals have fallen to their deaths, Nikolau seems strangely unmoved, other than with the dim recognition that she could be next. Even the pair’s reunion tour to Kuala Lumpur is sparked not by a desire for connection, but instead to cash in on some rich guy’s offer to buy an NFT of their ascent.
Near the final fade-out, Beerkus and Nikolau reflect — ever so briefly — on life after rooftopping. Negotiating that, Skywalkers hints, may be the real leap of faith.
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