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Danny Boyle’s new film makes audience faint
Three viewers collapse at Toronto film festival as 127 Hours shows climber hacking off his own arm
Danny Boyle's new film 127 Hours, which shows the main character hacking off his arm with a pen-knife, is so realistic and gruesome that it caused several members at a Toronto film festival screening to faint.
At least three people passed out during the most harrowing scene in the film, which tells the true-life story of 27-year-old American adventurer Aron Ralston who was forced to amputate his own arm after he became trapped under an 800ilb boulder in Utah.
Boyle shows how a delirious Ralston (Spider-Man's James Franco) uses a rock to break his arm bones before sawing off the limb with a blunt knife. Finally, he snips through his tendons with pliers.
John H Fort, a critic for the film industry website TheWrap.com, said he witnessed three faintings and one seizure at the film's first public screening, at this week's Toronto film festival. "Make no mistake, the scenes of Aron Ralston taking off his own arm to free himself after a fall are among the most realistic of graphic gore ever put on film, and not for the faint of heart.
"You could clearly see people in shock, struggling to stay in their seats, working to get past the intensity of what was going on in front of them. The sequence is never gratuitous, just very realistic... These were clearly audience members who could not take it."
Early reviews for the film, which will have its British premiere on the closing night of the London Film Festival on October 28, have been positive. In a four-star review, Time Out called 127 Hours "an intense, white-knuckle ride of a movie... There are harrowing scenes here you might not want to watch, but the movie as a whole is simply unmissable".
Those who fainted in Toronto can take heart from the fact that the man himself, Aron Ralston, found the amputation scene hard to take. At a press conference following the screening, he told journalists: "The experience of the very gruesome arm-removing [was], like, 'Whoa, I can't believe we're watching this!' I was ecstatic to be getting out of there." ·
