There’s something undeniably eerie about mountain climbing. You’re alone, exposed, suspended high above the ground with only a few ropes and your instincts to keep you alive. Combine that with horror, and you should have a recipe for something tense and unforgettable. That’s exactly what “The Sound” seems to promise—especially in its strong, gripping opening. Unfortunately, it’s a promise the movie doesn’t really keep.
Let’s start with the good stuff.
The film opens with a flashback set in 1959, high up in British Columbia’s infamous “Forbidden Wall,” a mountain range that’s gained a ghostly reputation over the years. We meet a lone climber at the summit, who suddenly notices something odd—his guide rope is being pulled. Not by wind, not by gravity, but by something unseen. As he tries desperately to unhook himself, the rope stays taut, pulling him upward. The scene crackles with tension and mystery, leaning more on suggestion than spectacle. It’s a perfect horror setup: isolated location, a terrifying unknown, and just enough ambiguity to let your imagination run wild.
If the rest of “The Sound” had stuck to this style—subtle, suggestive, atmospheric—it could have been a genre standout. But sadly, after this promising intro, the film shifts gears and never really finds its rhythm again.
Fast forward to 2022, and the Forbidden Wall is now open again for the first time since that mysterious 1959 incident. A group of modern-day climbers decides to scale the Wall, partly driven by personal reasons and partly by sheer mountaineering ambition. Leading the expedition is Colton (played by Nicholas Baroudi), but the emotional core of the group is Sean (Marc Hills), whose grandfather was one of the climbers lost during that fateful 1959 trip. This personal connection is supposed to add weight to Sean’s journey, but the movie never quite fleshes him out enough to make us care.
The film tries to build credibility by focusing on the climbers’ preparation, using a lot of technical jargon and procedural details. There’s talk of cams, nuts, walkoffs, face wraps, and all the other things that only rock-climbing enthusiasts would recognize. On one hand, this attempt at realism is commendable—it shows that the filmmakers did their research. But on the other hand, the characters often sound like walking climbing manuals, especially when they’re not mid-ascent.
You get the sense that the filmmakers wanted to create a “serious” mountaineering movie with horror elements sprinkled in. The problem is, they forgot to bring the actual scares.
Once the climbers are finally on the Wall, the movie should really take off. After all, we’re primed for suspenseful sequences of people dangling above death, haunted by unseen forces. Instead, the action is fragmented. The tension keeps getting undercut by clunky dialogue, clichéd backstories, and flat attempts at bonding between characters.
At one point, Sean and his team are split up into pairs. There’s some banter, some “we’re-in-this-together” energy, but it’s all so forced that it feels more like a reality show than a horror film. When the spooky elements start creeping in, they’re not handled with the subtlety of that brilliant opening. Instead, we get heavy-handed effects, predictable scares, and way too many scenes where the characters stop everything to talk about their feelings or motivations.
The horror itself isn’t particularly inventive either. Rather than playing on psychological fears or leaving things to the imagination, “The Sound” keeps showing you exactly what’s happening. And not in a good, “holy crap, what am I looking at?!” kind of way. It’s more like, “Oh, okay, I guess that’s supposed to be scary?” The mystery of the Wall evaporates the moment the crew encounters their first supernatural hiccup.
There’s also an attempt to weave in a bit of spiritual folklore, but it ends up feeling hollow. Enter Chief Guyustees, played by Wayne Charles Baker—a mystical Indigenous character who knows all about the Wall’s secrets. Instead of being a nuanced, compelling addition to the narrative, he ends up spouting vague wisdom like a knockoff version of The Sphinx from Mystery Men. At one point, he surprises Sean in the middle of the night and cryptically tells him, “The ravens told me you were out for a walk.” Lines like that aren’t profound—they’re lazy shortcuts trying to pass off exposition as mysticism.
And sadly, this isn’t just a one-off moment. Guyustees continues to show up with foreboding warnings and cryptic guidance, none of which really land. It’s a missed opportunity to add depth and cultural texture to the story. Instead, it just reinforces tired stereotypes.
What’s perhaps most frustrating is that you can see glimpses of the better movie that “The Sound” could have been. Whenever the climbers are actually climbing—dangling, plotting their next move, or making split-second decisions—you feel some of that old-school adventure tension. These moments are exciting not because they’re scary, but because they tap into the thrill of problem-solving under pressure. Setting up mid-air tents, handing off ropes while suspended above the void, and finding the next tiny hold to grip—these could have been goldmines for anxiety-inducing drama.
But the movie doesn’t lean into these sequences enough. Instead, it gets bogged down by unnecessary exposition, ham-fisted dialogue, and overexplained plot turns. Even the horror elements—meant to make us fear what’s lurking on the Wall—fail to spark dread. There’s too much showing, too little suggestion, and a general lack of restraint.
One might argue that a found footage approach could’ve helped “The Sound.” In a found footage film, we’re often forced to experience events as the characters do—without context, without clarity, with only what the camera captures. That limitation can be a creative blessing in horror, especially when you want to keep things mysterious. Unfortunately, “The Sound” goes the opposite route: it gives us too much information and not enough atmosphere.
It doesn’t help that the characters never fully come to life. For a story about a close-knit team of elite athletes risking their lives together, we never really feel the bonds between them. Everyone’s defined by one trait or backstory bullet point, and none of the emotional beats truly land. Even Sean—who should be our entry point into this world—remains too generic to carry the film. We know his grandfather died on the Wall, but beyond that, he’s just a guy with a rope and a furrowed brow.
The performances aren’t the problem. The cast, to their credit, seem physically capable and committed to their roles. But when the material they’re working with is this thin, even the most athletic acting chops can’t salvage things. The dialogue often sounds like it was cribbed from a climbing instruction manual mixed with a horror movie cliché generator.
Visually, the movie also struggles. There are moments of beauty, particularly in the wider shots of the mountain and the wilderness. But once the action kicks in, the camera work becomes choppy and disorienting—not in a good, “the characters are panicking” way, but more in a “we didn’t plan this very well” kind of way. The effects, when they show up, are too digital and too frequent to maintain any sense of unease.
What’s most disappointing is that the concept itself is still so solid. A haunted mountain. A team of climbers slowly being picked off or haunted by something ancient and inexplicable. That setup practically writes itself. Think The Descent with cliffs instead of caves. Or The Thing with ropes instead of flamethrowers. Or even Vertical Limit meets The Blair Witch Project. “The Sound” had all the ingredients, but somehow managed to burn the stew.
In the end, “The Sound” is a movie that never quite finds its voice. It starts strong, stumbles through its middle, and ends on a whimper. It wants to be a grounded, procedural horror story, but leans too much into surface-level scares and underdeveloped mysticism. It wants to be a psychological thriller about legacy and fear, but ends up as a patchwork of tropes and technical talk. There are fleeting moments when you can almost hear the better film that’s buried underneath all the noise—but like a voice lost in the wind on the side of a mountain, it never quite reaches you.
Maybe the ravens saw it coming.
