Grief runs through the DNA of Off the Rails, a fascinating documentary about parkour. Following a group who take part in this extreme sport, using extensive self-shot footage across ten years of the film’s focus’ rise to YouTube fame, this is a work that never quite processes the complexity of its story, but is a compelling journey through a world many will be unfamiliar with.
Our subjects are Rikke Brewer and Aiden Knox, friends who discover parkour as an outlet for their teen boredom, one that became more as they found fame. But they have fallen on hard times, grappling with the loss of their best friend, Nye, and where they go at the junction this moment offers them.
Peter Day’s documentary (an expansion of his previous movie on the subject) is an engaging and compelling work, focusing on our group’s admirable talents. The feeling of voyeurism we get thanks to the nature of the footage being edited together is fascinating and the viewer becomes much more familiar with the subject being covered over the course of the run time. Where this work falls down is in some of the quieter moments. There are complicated themes to be explored here, how this fits with masculinity, the lived experiences of urban youth in Britain and further a field, and the process of transitioning to adulthood, and it feels at times like too much has been bitten off here. I would have loved more from peripheral figures like Rikke’s mother and Aiden’s father, and certainly this is a work that could have had both a great narrative clarity and an expansion of its world view. But for a kinetic look at this sport, Off the Rails makes the leap and lands comfortably.
Our subjects are Rikke Brewer and Aiden Knox, friends who discover parkour as an outlet for their teen boredom, one that became more as they found fame. But they have fallen on hard times, grappling with the loss of their best friend, Nye, and where they go at the junction this moment offers them.
Peter Day’s documentary (an expansion of his previous movie on the subject) is an engaging and compelling work, focusing on our group’s admirable talents. The feeling of voyeurism we get thanks to the nature of the footage being edited together is fascinating and the viewer becomes much more familiar with the subject being covered over the course of the run time. Where this work falls down is in some of the quieter moments. There are complicated themes to be explored here, how this fits with masculinity, the lived experiences of urban youth in Britain and further a field, and the process of transitioning to adulthood, and it feels at times like too much has been bitten off here. I would have loved more from peripheral figures like Rikke’s mother and Aiden’s father, and certainly this is a work that could have had both a great narrative clarity and an expansion of its world view. But for a kinetic look at this sport, Off the Rails makes the leap and lands comfortably.