‘Free Solo’ review — Rock climbing and relationships without a rope

Free Solo follows climber Alex Honnold as he prepares mentally and physically to climb a 3,000-foot rock wall… without a rope.

Free Solo is about obsession. The subject at the center of the film, Alex Honnold, is obsessed with free soloing, a sport where a climber traverses a mountain without any ropes or harnesses. Just their hands and feet on tiny divets and grooves in the rock prevent them from falling to their death.

When Alex speaks about free soloing he talks about it being scary. However, I don’t think he refers to fear the same way that normal people do. In a bit of a humorous segment, he goes to a doctor who gives him an MRI that reveals that his amygdala needs extreme circumstances to register fear.

That part of his character, coupled with his obsession and inability to process emotion, make Free Solo a riveting character study. Husband and wife team Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who are friends of Alex, capture his mental journey as much as his physical one as he prepares for his hardest—and most dangerous—free soloing project yet.

Alex is bent on conquering El Capitan, a 3,000-foot tall granite rock wall in Yosemite National Park. Through interviews with the film crew chronicling his journey, a history lesson in the dangers of soloing, and a storyline following Alex’s new relationship with Sanni McCandless—she met Alex at one of his book signings—we see exactly how his mind works and how his choice of career affects the people around him.

Free Solo didn’t have as much impact on me initially. For a movie about someone who is embarking on what most of us would define as a suicide mission, there wasn’t as much tension as I thought there would be. It’s difficult to translate danger when you know the outcome, but I was hoping that there would be more stakes.

But in the coming days, I found myself thinking about the movie. Not about the rock climbing—though all those scenes are shot with vertigo-inducing wide shots and impressive close-ups of every precariously small foothold and grip. Instead, I found myself thinking about Alex—his motivations, the inner-workings of his mind, and his relationship with Sanni.

Free Solo is a character study through and through. We get to know Alex and why he’s comfortable taking the risk of dying doing what he loves over a girl that he may or may not love—his feelings toward Sanni are an enigma throughout the film.

Does he love her? Does he even understand love? Why does she stay in a relationship where she isn’t a factor in decisions that involve whether he lives or dies? That is the driving conflict behind Free Solo even more than whether or not he’ll conquer El Capitan.

What also adds to that accomplishment is that Free Solo contests its existence as a film. The filmmakers creating the project struggle with the possibility that they could be capturing the demise of their friend. Even Alex struggles with the reason he’s having a film crew following him.

Still, what you come to Free Solo for is the rock climbing. And rock climbing there is. The film ends with an incredibly captured climbing sequence that is rooted in character. Before that, in another sequence, Alex explains in detail what makes soloing El Capitan so difficult and runs through with technical precision exactly what you have to do at each section, put bluntly, to not die.

For Alex, soloing just makes sense. If anything, it confuses him why there aren’t more people tempting fate. He says at one point that you can die any day, so why not do something like soloing. From Sanni’s perspective, it’s because you should maximize your lifespan to spend it with people that you love. At the end of the movie, we don’t know if Alex understands that. We can only hope.

Free Solo is available to buy or rent on Amazon