94 min | R | November 13, 2020 | Sony Pictures Classics
Two friends ride bikes up a mountain in France. One of them confesses he has slept with the other’s fiancee. The friendship survives. The wedding is a different question.
Kyle and Mike are best friends, and the film opens with Mike pedaling alongside Kyle up a brutal French climb to confess that he has slept with Kyle’s fiancee. The betrayal sets the terms for everything that follows. The movie tracks these two men across years of weddings, funerals, holidays, and reconciliations, each chapter pulling them apart and dragging them back together. The Climb is about codependency dressed up as friendship. It understands that some bonds are not healthy and refuses to pretend otherwise.
Kyle Marvin plays Kyle as a soft, conflict-avoidant pushover who keeps absorbing damage because confrontation costs more than he can pay. Michael Angelo Covino plays Mike as a charming wreck who ruins his own life and then leans on Kyle to rebuild it. The two have a lived-in rapport that makes the cruelty land as comedy and the comedy land as genuine hurt. Gayle Rankin plays Marissa, the woman Kyle eventually marries, with a sharp read on exactly what Mike is. Talia Balsam and George Wendt anchor the family scenes as Suzi and Jim, parents who watch this friendship with weary recognition.
Covino directs his first feature and co-writes it with Marvin, and the defining choice is structural. The film unfolds in long, unbroken takes that follow the characters through entire arguments and reconciliations without cutting away. The opening climb plays out in a single shot that holds on both men as the confession detonates and the bikes keep moving. The camera tracks, circles, and reframes inside one continuous breath, which forces the actors to play the full emotional swing in real time. Chapter titles divide the years, and a recurring use of song breaks the tension with deadpan precision.
The Climb knows that the funniest thing about these two men is also the saddest thing. They cannot quit each other, and the movie never lets you decide whether that is love or sickness. Covino and Marvin built a comedy out of a friendship that should have ended in the first scene and never does. The formal control keeps it from collapsing into sitcom. It holds the discomfort long enough to make you feel it.