Hanging by a Wire Film Review: Feel the Peril

Hanging by a Wire suitably tells a frightening true story through raw footage and reenactments, though it fails to fully explore the factors around that story.

In northwest Pakistan, children get to and from school via cable cars over a mountain pass. But in August 2023, all but one of a car’s wires snapped, leaving six teenagers and two adults dangling 900 feet off the ground. The documentary depicts the ensuing 14-hour rescue at the hands of the military, a zipline team, and even a group of unauthorized lower-class civilians. A lot of footage comes from news reports, drone shots taken on the day, eyewitness footage on the ground, and reenactments, all working together to take you through most of the major beats of this story… and not a whole lot else.

That’s not to say Hanging by a Wire isn’t overall effective, especially if you never knew about this crisis. The non-reenacted footage gives you a clear understanding of exactly how precarious the situation is and why any rescue attempt is so delicate. As the title says, there’s literally one wire holding the passengers up from certain death, and that wire is at the mercy of prolonged strain, wind, and even the actions that are required to perform rescues. You feel that just through the footage alone, whether it’s in the air with the passengers or on the ground with their understandably frightened parents and friends. At its best, the imagery is downright unreal.

The bulk of the reenacted sequences take place at night. Yes, the rescue takes that long, and this approach is used because a) very dark night is very dark, and b) these are the less “professional” rescues. The reenactments are solidly shot, effectively lit visualizations that put you in the rescuers’ disoriented shoes – or harnesses – while getting the scale across. Some fictionalizations of real events in other films are so good that you forget about the outcome you know already happened, and I wouldn’t call these scenes that good. But they blend in well with the raw material and do justice to these kids’ stories.

Now, if you’re wondering how something like this could’ve happened at all, why so many different parties were needed, and what the long-term ramifications were… so am I. Hanging by a Wire does bring most of these bullet points up, but that’s all they amount to: bullet points. It lets you know who built these cable cars and that the region’s authorities are troublingly ignorant unless the story gets wider coverage, but it never really presses how and why these circumstances are the way they are. Even the testimonies from different groups of people, some of whom disagree, have trouble breaking through to address the greater structural issues from before and especially after this day.

I can see the most contentious person in this story being Sahib Khan, a local who took part in a completely unapproved rescue that authorities didn’t even know about at the time. At the risk of speaking as someone completely detached from this real-life traumatic event, you could make arguments for or against this kind of rescue. The film itself addresses how it could be noble but also what makes it dangerously reckless even in the eyes of the trapped kids, so credit there. But you could spend hours discussing how much nobility should matter here, what the positive outcome does or doesn’t justify, how much Khan’s pushback is classism versus strategic faults, or whether he has better expertise despite his class.

Ideally, that should be why we have documentaries like this instead of just watching compilations of the footage slapped together. Dig deeper into the context in ways you couldn’t do through any other format. Instead, Hanging by a Wire is a very straightforward depiction of what happened. Now, it’s still an unbelievable story that thankfully ended positively, and I’m sure the people involved got some form of catharsis by having it out there. Even a safe documentary about that is going to still be good as long as it fully captures the event itself, which this one does in a highly digestible 75 minutes. But if you want more than that, I don’t think you’ll get it.

Hanging by a Wire had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2026 and will be screened again, in person and online, until February 2.