Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’ on Netflix, a By-Turns Phony and Truthful Documentary About a Death-Defying Couple

Skywalkers: A Love Story (now on Netflix) is a celebration of influencers doing extremely idiotic things, and for that, it’s highly entertaining bullshit. The documentary profiles Angela Nikolau and Ivan “Vanya” Beerkus, Russian lovers who illegally break into skyscrapers, climb to the tippy-top and shoot photos and videos of themselves posing. Sponsors (of dubious ethics, of course) pay them to do this, because what’s a little trespassing, b&e and risk of death when there’s money-generating content to be splattered all over Instagram (like, I dunno, a watermelon dropped from the top of a really tall building)? Which isn’t to say directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina have made a bad movie – that’ll inevitably be a hit for Netflix, natch. But it certainly deserves a little critical rigor before we hail it for being a grandiose metaphor for love and trust between two humans. 

SKYWALKERS: A LOVE STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a disclaimer that the film depicts “extremely dangerous and illegal” acts that should not be imitated. Thank you, Dr. Stupid! Then we get a framing device: Angela and Vanya, wearing phony construction outfits, sneak through Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118, a still-under-construction megaskyscraper that goes up 2,200 feet and is capped with a 525-foot spire. Workers show up and they have to hide – for hours. Five hours becomes 10 hours becomes nearly 30 hours. How’d they end up here? Glad you asked! They’re “rooftoppers,” thrillseeking maniacs who climb and parkour to the tops of very tall buildings BECAUSE THEY’RE THERE. Have people died doing this? Indeed – too many, in fact. One is surely too many, and the number is much higher than that. 

Angela and Vanya prefer to be called “skywalkers” though, because they consider themselves artists. I can buy that, to a degree. Angela, a trained gymnast who’s the daughter of circus performers, does it so she’ll be remembered, unlike her parents. Vanya started doing it to get away from his constantly arguing parents – “The higher I get, the easier it is to breathe,” he says – and eventually made a living at it, because once his social media posts went viral, the sponsorships rolled in. They considered themselves competitors until they decided to collaborate; the likes piled up and, as is inevitable when two young, attractive people are fixated on the same goal, they fell in love. “What’s more dangerous, roofs or you?” Angela jokes to her beau as they snuggle.

How do we know their love is TRUE? Well, we see footage of them being chased by cops after making a nutty climb in Paris, and Vanya could’ve gotten away but he let himself get caught because they’d already nabbed Angela. TRES ROMANTIQUE. Two years later, they’re bickering like an old couple, you know, stop micromanaging me and all that, while they’re scaling some ludicrous construction site so Angela can be photographed plieing in a designer bodysuit. Then, covid hits and their money goes away and they resort to – ugh, gasp – creating regular old boring social media content to survive. And then the Russia-Ukraine war breaks out, and the Russian government bans Facebook and Instagram – bummerz! 

Vanya stirs a little cash by selling NFTs, but then they have a hell of an idea: They’ll go to Malaysia and climb Merdeka. They hug their tearful parents goodbye and spend their absolute last pennies to train for weeks in Thailand and stay in what is pretty much the opposite of a hostel. They plot out a plan to go allllllllllllll the way up there, where they’ll take breathtaking drone footage of Vanya holding Angela in a swan pose while the winds swirl. But before that happens, will they learn to really really really truly trust each other? Easier said than done!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Hey Skywalkers, Man on Wire and Free Solo would like a word with you.

Performance Worth Watching: I dunno – do these influencers ever stop performing? Hard to tell.

Memorable Dialogue: “The client was very happy,” Angela deadpans after she and Vanya complete a moronically dangerous skyscraper climb in China

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: And then they fell all the way down and died, the end. No! Do you think Netflix would release an exploitationist tragedy? (Actually, don’t answer that.) This isn’t a Werner Herzog documentary, you know. So much for suspense – but Skywalkers is well-directed enough to be entertaining in the moment, even if the outcome never really is in doubt. You’ll feel manipulated, but also satisfied with this treatment of the story.

Of course, I smell a lot of rats in the third act: Angela’s mission-threatening injury three weeks before the big climb, the breakup-and-make-up-so-they-can-dream-it-and-do-it drama, etc. – I call bullshit. These pretty obvious dramatic “enhancements” feel more like reality TV chicanery than serious documentary filmmaking, and lead us to question the credibility of some of this content. Were they really trapped in the Merdeka for more than 24 hours without enough water, getting more physically and mentally exhausted by the minute, like we see in the cold open? Or is this just a cheap manipulation to generate some suspense for the sake of the movie?

Notably, Zimbalist and Bukhonina documented Angela and Vanya achievements for several years, but Angela and Vanya filmed themselves during their climbs. That’s the footage we’re here to see. It’s unvarnished, and as beautiful as it is terrifying. Their feet slipping on dampened scaffolding, hundreds of feet above the pavement? Angela swallowing her fear – after watching disturbing videos of rooftoppers’ deadly failures – so she can get to the top? That feels real. There’s no denying that they’re athletes pushing through psychological barriers, knowing their bodies are stronger than their trepidations.

Structurally, the directors present the final act like it’s a one-last-score heist drama, complete with countdown title cards, tense training sessions and in-depth planning sessions; Vanya posits that performing the climb during the World Cup final will find the security guards too distracted by the game to do their job well, a bit that seems wholesale lifted from an Ocean’s 11 movie. It’s slick and watchable, if calculated, filmmaking.

Thematically, Skywalkers is fried ring baloney sandwiches, at least on the surface: The universal learning-to-trust metaphor it hammers home smacks of heavily manufactured symbolism, which ultimately doesn’t eclipse the look-at-me influencer bleccch of Vanya and Angela’s shameless clout-chasing. But dig a little deeper, and there’s something keenly observational about some humans’ need to perform extreme acts for their own sake – in a way, this is the story of climbers scaling Everest or strapping homemade rockets to their backs and lighting the fuse, albeit wrapped in social media-era trappings. Peel away some of the phony layers of this doc and you’ll find a seed of truth about human nature, an assertion that one needs to take risks in order to feel truly alive. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Don’t watch Skywalkers for its love-story shenanigans – those are tough to swallow. Watch it to test your acrophobia, and for the keenly observational metaphors lurking beneath the blatantly contrived ones.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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