Wild

Hiking really is like nothing else.

As amateur participants ourselves, we can attest to its unique painfulness and weird timelessness, the fact it so entirely removes you from your everyday life, captivating every part of you in its attendant ‘newness’, the more the days wind on. If you do it right – and it’s hard not to, really – you never want to leave, all you want is the strange configurations of food, the deep sleeps, the rocks, the wilderness, and rarely other people. It’s just you and the earth, uninterrupted, and its allure is utterly bewitching.

It can indeed be the perfect distraction from life, and Wild, the new film from Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallée, captures the unique euphoria of that, and how existentially ruminative and personal the process can be for the person hiking.

Wild finds Reese Witherspoon’s Cheryl Strayed turning to a three-month trek in a state of exhausted desperation. Because the activity is not in itself a desperate act – it’s not easy or cowardly, rather quite brave and defiant – the trials we learn her character is trying to gain distance from are framed in a more humanistic light: one that lets us better mourn the bad for how they’ve affected her character, and all the more applaud the good, for here now she is again, climbing back to lost heights.