The daredevil charms of Skywalkers: A Love Story teeter on the edge of reality

Anyone who’s ever scrolled a bit too long on their TikTok FYP or Instagram Explore page has probably witnessed at least one video of a rooftopper hanging from an icy crane or completing some other death-defying stunt miles above the safety of the sidewalk. For those who may be a little less online, “rooftoppers” are a new breed of renegade social media stuntperson, one that treats the world’s skyscrapers as a personal playground (usually dodging authorities to get there), all for the purpose of content creation. If you’re anything like this writer, you’ve seen these images and videos but absorbed them passively—perhaps with a slight twinge in your stomach, but nothing more to set them apart from anything else in the endless stream of content we all ford day in and day out. Herein lies the intrigue—and the tragedy—of Jeff Zimablist’s Skywalkers: A Love Story. 

The years-in-the-making documentary contains breathtaking, gut-in-your shoes drone and GoPro footage of its subjects perched atop the tallest buildings in the world, as they chat about camera angles and follower counts as breezily as someone with a healthy sense of self-preservation might from the comfort of their own couch. Yet, for all its leads’ talk of elevating rooftopping to a form of high art, one can’t ignore the digital-age futility of their entire pursuit.

Skywalkers follows Russian daredevils Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus as they meet and fall in, out, and back in love again, all while preparing to scale Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118, the second-tallest building in the world. (It stands at a monstrous 2,227 feet.) The climb is especially enticing to the couple because the skyscraper’s spindly blue spire has never been successfully summited before—every other rooftopper who’s tried has been caught and arrested under Malaysia’s strict anti-trespassing laws. 

Over the course of Skywalkers, we learn that Angela, the daughter of circus performers, came to the dangerous hobby in an attempt to recapture the beauty of her parents’ love after her father left their family. Ivan starts the story as a more established rooftopper, one who already has plenty of sponsors egging him on. It’s one of these sponsors that encourages him to select a female rooftopper to boost his content, and the rest is history. It’s your classic “boy picks girl for sponcon, boy and girl bicker over how to best photograph girl’s legs while she dangles off the side of an 80-story building, boy and girl encourage each other to take a skyscraper’s virginity” story.

Between these mercenary beats, there are some genuinely moving moments. Nikolau and Beerkus may not have the eye to totally capture the type of art they think they’re creating, but Zimbalist sure does. Skywalkers is stunningly edited, splicing Beerkus’ and Nikolau’s GoPro footage with the sort of wide-angle shots that deserve to be seen on the biggest screen possible, and uncommonly engaging. Angela and Ivan’s love story often feels almost too storybook to be plausible (more on that later), but it’s next to impossible not to root for them as they support each other—often physically—through their many costumed security evasions and insane stunts. 

The film’s final third specifically feels ripped from an Eastern European Mission: Impossible spin-off, as the duo pore over blueprints and Google Maps screenshots to plot their entry into the Malaysian tower—a plan that involves scaling the roof of a stadium and sneaking through a half-built mall before climbing 118 floors, all without getting caught—and then film themselves executing that plan to thrilling effect. Not to spoil anything, but there’s one snag in the scheme with results so outlandish they might have seemed like a screenplay’s unnecessary third act Hail Mary if they weren’t, you know, real.

The fact that Skywalkers: A Love Story can even be discussed in these traditional narrative terms, however, conceals the harness hiding just off screen. Nikolau and Beerkus are professional content creators; their livelihood depends on their ability to obscure the messier aspects of their own lives for an easily digestible—and more importantly, marketable—story. Skywalkers does pry off the mask its subjects wear for their followers online, but never attempts to interrogate the ways they obscure reality for its own cameras. The end result is something that doesn’t necessarily feel disingenuous or even manipulative, but doesn’t feel quite truthful either. There’s a lot left on the table in favor of the film’s tidy “lovers on a mission” narrative. COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are presented as nothing but driving forces to get the couple to Asia, for example, while a scene where Nikolau learns that literally every single one of her old rooftopping buddies is dead is brushed over as just a little snag in the prep for their climb. That devastating reveal—along with the staggering human toll of this new “sport”—is never brought up again.

So what was it all for in the end? Apart from this documentary, the answer is…an NFT. Yep! Just one silly little NFT of Beerkus lifting Nikolau, Dirty Dancing-style, at the end of their climb. The internal message of Skywalkers: A Love Story is one of triumph and hope, but its external takeaway is far more sinister: In this digital age, you can dedicate your entire life to scaling the heights beyond what was previously thought possible—you can even lose your life for that pursuit—but you still might end up as a 30-second blip during someone’s commute, or a mere footnote in the story of whoever’s forced to climb even higher.

Director: Jeff Zimbalist, Maria Bukhonina (co-director)
Release Date: July 19, 2024 (Netflix)