“This film contains extremely dangerous and illegal activities,” reads the Jackass-esque title card at the beginning of Skywalkers: A Love Story. “Do not attempt to imitate.” No kidding. After watching a film like this, you might think twice about going higher than the second story of a building. Maybe a nice comfortable mezzanine, at a push. It’s a feature-length documentary account of “rooftopping”, a singularly social media-driven craze (that seems also singularly Russian) in which young people illicitly ascend rooftops, scaffolding, cranes and other extremely tall structures, in order to get the most epic of selfies, the grandest of panoramas, the most Instagram-friendly drone videos. If you caught the 2022 palm-sweating B-movie thriller Fall — well, this is basically the nonfiction version.
Director Jeff Zimbalist and co-director Maria Bukhonina cannily decide not to simply tell a story about this unusual phenomenon, but focus instead on a couple within that community: Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus. Apparently two of the best in the business, they are brought together by the same strange hobby and quickly find themselves in a whirlwind romance. Their love feels genuine, even if they both recognise the strength of the narrative that it provides for their hungry social media audience, and the unlikely couple selfies they manage to snag. “Now we were more than just daredevils,” says Nikolau. “Now we were telling a love story.”
Ultimately a straightforward affair of the heart.
But soon the honeymoon period is over and they are bickering on a ladder, a lovers tiff that takes on a different dynamic at 800 feet. So there are essentially two narratives here: an attempt to understand why these young people would put themselves in harm’s way, just for social media clout (at least 20 so-called urban explorers have died as a result of rooftopping); and as the title suggests, getting under the skin of the gravity-cross’d lovers. It all builds to one big climb, of the still-under-construction Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, the second tallest building in the world. It’s a logistically complex, legally risky and life-threatening challenge, which they plan to end with a Dirty Dancing-style lift, and achieve ultimate rooftopping renown.
Like 2008’s Man On Wire — another romantic documentary about audacious, vertiginous feats — the filmmakers cede the voice, and to some extent the authorship, of the film to its subjects. The only voices we hear on screen and in voiceover are of Nikolau and Beerkus, which sometimes makes the film feel like an extension of their ever-growing social media empire, or one giant advert for their signature NFTs, a major source of their income. And it feels like the direction could be more probing in understanding their death-defying motivations, or why it is mostly Russians who rooftop (the Russo-Ukraine conflict is only briefly mentioned, even though it creates huge problems).
Still, the feats they undertake are undeniable in their bone-chilling drama, the risks head-smashingly obvious. We are shown brief, sobering clips of the rooftoppers upon whom Lady Luck did not smile, while moments where Beerkus casually mentions, halfway up a crane, that his “shoes are slipping”, will have you watching through your fingers. And as the title promises, this is ultimately a straightforward affair of the heart. “Love is like heights,” says Nikolau at the end, finding an almost-too-neat parallel. “The fear never goes away. You just get better at facing it.” They are disarmingly sweet — and, as Dirty Dancing taught us, nobody puts Baby in a corner. Baby gets put on a massive bloody skyscraper instead.