On the morning of August 22, 2023, something went horribly wrong in the remote mountains of Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province: A makeshift gondola that was carrying eight people — most of them teenagers on their way to school — from one peak to another was left dangling on its side 1,000 feet in the air when two of the system’s mile-long cable car wires snapped without warning.

Like the Tham Luang cave rescue, the Copiapó mining accident, and the litany of other disasters that have been disseminated over the internet in media res, the situation in Battagram immediately became equal parts crisis and spectacle, as the industrialized world pivoted its narrow spotlight towards a poor stretch of the Himalayas that it had previously been happy to ignore. 

How long would it be until the boys plummeted to their deaths? What could the Pakistani government do to help a people who’d always been left to fend for themselves? Why does it feel like no one would have cared as much about the outcome if not for the fact that a local drone operator was there to capture it all in jarring close-up, his camera hovering just a few inches away from the passengers’ faces as they stood motionless inside the refurbished sheet metal, afraid that even the slightest movement might send the cable car screaming to the bottom of the valley below? TV news stations were eager to confront their viewers with the first two questions. At its best, Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s taut but frustratingly anemic “Hanging by a Wire” takes a few measured steps toward addressing the third. 

Molded on E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s “The Rescue,” but sorely missing that film’s artful suspense and rich characterizations, the 77-minute “Hanging by a Wire” gets right down to business with the sort of “don’t click away to some true-crime bullshit!” urgency that all docs seem to require now that the entire medium has been relegated to streaming. Here is the valley. It’s gorgeous but secluded. Here are the cable cars. They are clearly made and maintained by the locals. It was just another school day until BOOM — cue the very canned sound of an explosion over the soundtrack — the wires snapped at the worst possible time. 

From the moment the movie starts, there is little doubt in our minds that most or all of the passengers will ultimately survive; I’d like to think that we’d remember if things went south, but the more relevant tell is that people don’t really make upbeat, action-forward, heart in your chest rescue docs about terrified kids who died horribly while their parents watched. Still, Naqvi does what he can to engender some doubt, as he introduces the boys through memorial-like still photographs (often being held by their fathers, who speak of their sons in the present tense, and whose only function here is to say things like “I can still feel the utter despair from that day” in a variety of different ways), and diverts our attention from them until the rescue is well underway. 

In the meantime, Naqvi introduces us to a terrifically memorable cast of characters, all of whom help to explain why he was so compelled to make this movie, but few of whom receive the degree of detail they deserve.

First up is Sumaira Khan, a pro-active news anchor who grew up in Battagram, but has since worked her way into an on-air gig at SAMAA TV, and feels an obligation to help the people of her hometown (knowing full well that the authorities need an extra kick in the ass to bother with the country’s poorer communities). She effectively passes the baton to police chief Sonia Shamraz, another woman who knows a thing or two about defying the odds. Seen here cosplaying as herself in some of the film’s least essential recreations, Shamraz determines that the locals can’t be trusted to save themselves, and sends in a rescue helicopter without communicating her plan to the anguished parents and friends who are watching the situation unfold. 

“Hanging by a Wire” doesn’t call much attention to the class divide that runs through the middle of this film like a faultline, but the broader points speak for themselves. You can hear it plainly in the use of language (the big city types are fluent in English, while the Battagram residents talk in Pashto or Urdu), and in the disregard that authorities like Shamraz have for “Sky Pirate” Sahib Khan, a winsome Battagram native who fearlessly attempts to save the kids with a pulley he cobbled together from $15 worth of spare parts. Confident in his know-how, Khan is forced to access the cable car from the other side of the valley — where the cops won’t stop him. 

They have a Sky Pirate of their own, an entrepreneur and wildly entertaining social media influencer who runs the world’s highest zipline and is more than happy to flaunt his success. Despite being the “best-looking member of his family” with “a handsome body,” Ali Swati feels like a disappointment to his father because he wasn’t able to serve in the Pakistani Army, and sees the cable car situation as the perfect chance to prove his worth. 

Swati’s mid-air clashes with Khan are destined to become the film’s most valuable source of interpersonal conflict, and “Hanging by a Wire” clearly recognizes the nature of the tension between them, but Naqvi passes up the opportunity to shine a more revealing light at the subtext of their relationship. That’s par for the course in a documentary that loses a lot of its you are there intensity when the dark of night descends on the dangling cable car, forcing Naqvi to transition from first-hand footage to studio-bound recreations starring the real people who survived the crisis.

These sequences are elegantly shot and psychologically mega-charged (though “Hanging by a Wire” does precious little to engage with the anxiety of dramatizing the worst day of your life), but the pitch-black void isn’t a particularly exciting backdrop, and the operation itself is absent the insane twists that all but ensured “The Rescue” would be adapted into a Ron Howard movie. 

Hollywood is far too white to make a similar go at “Hanging by a Wire” (there’s no role for Christian Bale to play here), but it wouldn’t be the worst idea for another film industry to give it a whirl, as this is the rare documentary thriller that feels like it might actually be improved by scripted dialogue and some more extensive stunt work. Naqvi has thoughtfully collected all of the right ingredients for a more penetrating story, and it’s easy enough to appreciate how his emphasis on basic entertainment value is a roundabout effort to return the world’s attention to Battaram (whose infrastructure has yet to be improved, something I had to discover on my own time after the movie had ended), but the movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal. 

Rather than offering a nuanced response to any of the issues it raises from the start, “Hanging by a Wire” ultimately asks a different set of questions — one that Naqvi’s film is less equipped to answer. Chief among them: At a time when every disaster is captured on video, what’s the value of fleshing them out into feature-length documentaries? It would seem there’s a need for filmmakers to perform rescue missions of their own — to rescue the stuff of recent history from the slipstream of social media content and restore a measure of dignity to the people who suffered for the world’s morbid amusement. Naqvi is able to accomplish that at least, but the movie he’s made is unwilling to go even the slightest bit further, as if the filmmaker were afraid that audiences’ last remaining connection to non-fiction cinema would snap if he applied any more weight to it. 

Grade: C+

“Hanging by a Wire” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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