Zip Wire (2026) Review: Ridiculous Heights, Relentless Screaming

• Film Title: Zip Wire (2026)
• Cast: MyAnna Buring (Amy Watson), Joseph Millson (Evan), Saffron Burrows (Donaldson), Silvia Presente (Chloe), Michael Amariah (Robert)
• Director: Howard J. Ford
• Writer: Tom Boyle
• Distribution: Signature Entertainment (UK); REinvent International Sales (worldwide sales); Eagle Entertainment (AU)
• Production: Scanner-Rhodes Productions
• Release Date: August 30th, 2026 (world premiere, Tubi FrightFest); UK digital August 31st, 2026; November 4th in AU (internet)
• Watched on: Internet streaming
• Review by: Mother of Movies

A Fear of Heights Thriller With an Elevator Problem – Zip Wire Review

Zip Wire builds a survival thriller around a scientist too scared to ride her office elevator, then asks you to cheer for her on a mountain. I couldn’t. Howard J. Ford’s film is perfectly watchable, which is a polite way of saying it works best as background noise. The heights work is better than I expected and that’s a side from what little I know about green screens. I wanted someone to get behind, but no one was likable enough.

I had to check I hadn’t started this halfway through. Amy is running from a woman who keeps insisting nobody is chasing her and that’s she’s having a panic attack. Then she’s on a zip line with her clip not attached. Another woman is barrelling down the wire towards her, and she wakes up. Ugh.

The film opens in media res, flashes forward to a taste of its own climax, then skips back in time to show how she got there. Clever technique, wrong movie for it.

In media res is a thing I usually like. However, Zip Wire didn’t need it because it just lessened the surprise of what the storyline clearly explains as a movie a about someone who is scared of heights and has OCD who overcomes her fears to save her cure.

In spite of a bad feeling I was getting about this being any good, I decided to give it some more time.

Time did not fix anything. The setup that follows is blunt. Not only does Amy have to take the stairs at work supported by her friend Chloe (her fear of heights is that bad) but she’s an OCD scientist surrounded by lab instruments. Many of them. Imagine keeping that in order.

Donaldson arrives with another boss to lecture her about her contract and her “condition” but Amy wants is to make her mum proud.

Her mother’s death from a disease she is close to curing gets dropped in through dialogue so we know what she’s working towards. Miss that information and the rest of the movie will be very confusing.

The research itself is a plot device, a cure and a lab with nothing specific to make us care.

Donaldson returns later to hint that Amy might never find what she’s searching for, in the tone of someone reading out a fortune cookie. Poor Amy? Amy also doesn’t speak for a long stretch. I honestly thought she was mute until she gets home to her partner Evan and asks him to tell her about the mountains again. Like as a bedtime story. He loves mountains and she can’t do heights. The film makes sure you notice the mismatch. I’m still unnerved about her wanting to fall asleep to stories about her greatest fear though. Maybe I underestimated Amy.

There’s a monologue about OCD going unrecognised, with a nod to how the obsessive streak makes her sharp. It’s the one stretch where the film stops moving long enough to say something, and then it moves on. The flow is all wrong and nothing feels important.

I’m Sorry Amy

I really disliked Amy. I wondered if it was my headache talking, but it wasn’t. The way she snaps into action in the second half like she’s been quietly training for mountaineering the whole time. Does dream training count?

The fear itself is plausible, and I’d know. I once climbed a ladder to rescue my cat from a very tall tree and ended up level with the second floor of my apartment building. A man washing dishes looked out his window, spotted me and came to help me down. That is my entire career at altitude. It ended with a rescue by a stranger mid-dishes. Someone who can’t take an elevator should be a liability on a mountain, not the best-prepared person on it when up against professionals.

The fear that defines Amy early on stops mattering when the plot needs her to move, and nothing in the performance bridges the gap.

Screaming, Heights and Sunday Housework

There’s a lot of screaming. My son even came in to see what was going on, and I told him they were just having trouble with heights. It was accurate until the stabbing. Thankfully, he had left by then.

Cinematically, the heights work is effective, and other effects are fine. Nothing turned my stomach, nothing looked cheap enough to pull me out. That’s about as high as my praise goes.

The tone never pretends to be smarter than it is, and quirky is fine. Odd with a lead I liked would have made for a much better afternoon.

This is the type of movie you watch while doing housework. It asks nothing of you, it makes enough noise that you’ll look up at the right moments, and it’s short enough that the weirdness of it all doesn’t have time to sour.

Fall made height horror a trend, and “Zip Wire” is the Sunday-afternoon cousin who turned up uninvited and kept talking.

Final Verdict

Zip Wire is built to be watched while pairing socks (if you can find them).

Zip Wire is rated

2 Unclipped carabiners out of 5

Where is Zip Wire Streaming

Movies Like Zip Line… Need More Heights?

• Fall (2022): Two climbers stranded on a radio tower; the better-looking height horror.
• The Ledge (2022): Ford and Boyle’s earlier cliffside survival thriller.
• Cliffhanger (1993): Mountain-set action with stunts that don’t need a phobia to work.
• Summit Fever (2022): Ryan Phillippe stars and climbs a very big rock.
• Vertical Limit (2000): High-altitude rescue chaos for people who like their peaks loud.
• Apex (2026): A popular action favorite with less heights than Zip Wire.
• Society of the Snow (2024): A documentary based on the true story and set on a snowy mountain top.

How Does Zip Wire End? We Explain the Twist

Filmmaker Stamp

Howard J. Ford has built one of the busiest careers in British independent genre filmmaking, with The Dead, The Dead 2, The Lockdown Hauntings, Escape, DarkGame, River of Blood and Bone Keeper behind him. He does his distribution through Sony, Paramount, Netflix and Altitude to show for it. With writer Tom Boyle he made The Ledge in 2022, a cliffside survival thriller that went wide in cinemas before finding a second audience on streaming. Zip Wire sends the pair back up a mountain, and it arrived at FrightFest only months after Bone Keeper played the Glasgow event.