Hanging by a Wire, by Mohammed Ali Naqvi, presents a nightmare come to life. In 2023, a cable car holding eight people, including six children, in the Himalayan foothills of northern Pakistan, had one of its wires snap, leaving them trapped 900 feet above the ground. It’s a terrifying prospect, one that leaves both those stuck in the car and those on the sidelines waiting for the absolute worst to happen.
Hanging by a Wire is a story that should be inherently nerve-wracking, as people try to find a way to save those hanging a quarter-mile from the surface. Yet while Naqvi gives a decent presentation of the events that happened and how this situation went down, Hanging by a Wire lacks both the tension and the depth that one would hope for in a story like this.
‘Hanging by a Wire’ Doesn’t Make Us Feel How Tense This Situation Truly Is
Naqvi’s documentary has an impressive amount of footage captured from this rescue. Once the wire snaps, the people watching the situation start filming and sharing their footage in an effort to get help sent to them. Not only that, but one person filming even recorded some incredibly close footage from a drone, able to swoop into the actual car with the eight trapped passengers. Because of this, we get plenty of angles and viewpoints of this unbelievable situation as it unfolds.
Naqvi also puts this footage together with plenty of interviews with the fathers of the children stuck in the cable car, the police chief trying to find help, and a group that calls themselves “sky pirates,” who attempt to use the remaining wire to rescue the eight stuck in the air. Naqvi is covering this story from every perspective you could imagine as we wait to see what happens in this ticking clock of a rescue.
But one of the major problems with Hanging by a Wire is that we rarely feel that nervous fear, that worry that things could go horribly wrong. Even if we don’t know the story of what happened, the film itself isn’t great at building the tension of this story, utilizing a weirdly uplifting score from the very beginning, and pacing this doc in such a way that it’s hard to get too worried about what is going to occur.
‘Hanging by a Wire’ Is Fairly Surface-Level With Its Interviews
Without spoiling how Naqvi handles this story, he makes a choice early on in the interviews that negates any worry that we might have fairly quickly. While we clearly don’t want to see these people fall to their deaths, Hanging by a Wire also never quite makes us feel anything other than that this story is going to end just fine. Considering even just the logline of this movie can put a pit in the bottom of your stomach, it’s unusual how Naqvi handles this story as we watch it play out.
Even though Naqvi does get plenty of interviews, it also feels like we’re getting a very surface-level look at what happened on the ground — and in the air. The interviews only really serve to tell us things we could probably parse out ourselves: the police chief had a hard time figuring out how to help in this unexpected situation; the parents whose kids were in the car were, of course, inconsolable about what might happen to their kids; and those in the car were obviously horrified about what was going to happen to them. But that’s really as deep as Hanging by a Wire goes. By the end of the doc, we don’t know much about any of these characters other than the very basics, and it’s a shame — especially in Naqvi’s interviews — that he doesn’t dig a bit deeper into who these people are.
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Most of the people we do get to spend more time with are those actively trying to save these eight. One of the most commanding and exciting characters comes in Sonia Shamraz, the police chief, who is going to do everything she can to solve this unthinkable issue. It’s also wild to see dueling characters who try to get out on the wire to make their own personal rescue, like Ali Swati, who wants to prove himself to his family through this act. Naqvi presents these people on the ground as compelling characters, yet doesn’t stick with them long enough to make their stories pop.
‘Hanging by a Wire’ Is Still a Worthwhile Documentary of This Harrowing Event
When watching Hanging by a Wire, it’s hard not to think of other recent documentaries about other harrowing events, such as 2021’s <em>The Rescue </em>by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, which told the story of the rescue of twelve boys in 2018 from a flooded cave in Thailand. Or another doc from Chin and Vasarhelyi, 2018’s <em>Free Solo</em>, which had us follow climber Alex Honnold in his attempt to climb a 3,000-foot high mountain without any safety gear. With both of these films, we go in knowing that things are probably going to end up okay since if they didn’t, we probably wouldn’t have a feature-length documentary about them.
Yet both of these films still make us feel the stress and strain inherent in these actions. We know the boys will be saved, and we know Honnold will survive his climb, but the film is still able to make us anxious about that. With Hanging by a Wire, we don’t get the same feeling. Instead, Naqvi knows how to document the event, but doesn’t know how to heighten it for those watching this for the first time.
Granted, the footage itself and the intense quest to save these eight still make Hanging by a Wire a documentary worth seeking out. It’s just one that doesn’t have as much depth as one would hope. This is without a doubt the type of truly unbelievable story that you want to see turned into a documentary, and yet even though the subject matter is remarkable, the way it’s told just leaves much to be desired. When Ron Howard‘s fictionalized take on The Rescue, <em>Thirteen Lives</em>, came out just a year after the doc, many were left wondering why even bother retelling this story again. But with Hanging by a Wire, maybe a retelling is in order, as this is absolutely a story that deserves telling with some flair.
Hanging by a Wire premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
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