THE SOUND (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Sound, Blue Harbor Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 26, 2025

Writer/director Brendan Devane comes up with a fairly decent idea for a horror story, in that its major threat is twofold. On one hand, it's about some ancient evil spirit that haunts a particular location and has led to an unknown number of deaths over the centuries. The other central element of this story is the more promising one: The location in question is a very tall mountain.

In theory, this should also mean that the tension of Devane's The Sound has two big components, as well. There's the malevolent spirit itself, which can take control of unassuming people and lead them to harm themselves and other people. Since all of that takes place while people are scaling the sheer rock face of a mountain with only minimal safety equipment, that makes the threats even more perilous than they already are.

Why, then, does Devane spend so much of this story telling us over and over again just how dangerous this situation could be, instead of simply showing it to us? One understands why the rock climbing sequences here aren't done for real, apart from an introduction showing two professionals at work on a different mountain and some establishing shots that are captured from so far away that they might as well be part of a different movie. Most of the movie takes place on the side of the mountain, called the Forbidden Wall (which should be a good enough reason for most ordinary people to avoid it), and most of the camera framing amounts to static close-ups or medium shots of actors barely moving on or just holding on tight to the rock face.

It's not only that the action here isn't real. It's also as if the filmmakers have done the bare minimum to even convince us that the action might be real. One of the easiest ways to generate suspense in a visual medium to show people hanging on for dear life in a very tall spot, and this movie doesn't even consider trying to fake that sight more than a few times. Some of the cheats, in fact, are more humorous than terrifying. At one point, a character yells at another one off-screen to be careful, and the camera stays locked on the first person as the other unseen character apparently falls.

To be fair, what Devane and the cinematographers, Ryan Galvan and Brett Lowell, do show us looks fine enough, in terms of the mountain surface itself and whatever effect was used to make it look as if the actors are set against the sky. If the mechanics of pulling off any trickery beyond that was either impossible due to safety or difficult due to the limited budget, it might have been better for Devane to keep this one on the backburner a bit longer. The premise feels wasted here.

Instead of generating the most obvious tension from the setup, then, the screenplay has a bunch of generic rock climbers spout repetitive exposition while stuck to the side of that mountain. The lead character is Sean (Marc Hills), a pro climber with a tragic back story that's very awkwardly told by real-life climbers Alex Honnold and Brette Harrington after an introductory sequence of some actual mountaineering. His girlfriend died during a climb, so now, Sean's a bit guilt-ridden and uncertain of himself.

He's not enough, apparently, to quickly join the team assigned to climb the Forbidden Wall after more than six decades and desperately want to get up the mountain himself. Team leader Colton (Nicholas Baroudi), though, keeps him at base camp as a backup, along with other seasoned climber Kerrie (Jolene Kay), who resents always playing second to her boss.

Here's how this actually plays, though. Sean talks to his father (played by William Fichtner) about wanting to climb the mountain, because his father's father was the last person to attempt to do so before a local tribal council barred all access to it. The rest of the team sits around the night before the climb talking about the mountain, Sean's grandfather, and the terrible tragedy that stopped it. The tribal council head (played by Wayne Charles Baker) tells Sean about the terrible evil atop the mountain, and while everyone's on the rock, they keep talking about the plan to climb and the rumors that there might be something wicked at the peak.

This goes on and on, and occasionally, Devane includes some creepiness of disembodied voices and the danger of a possessed climber crawling like a spider in defiance of human anatomy and physics. The Sound, though, should mainly be concerned with one job: to convince us that any of this could be happening for real. Because that fails, the movie does, too.

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