Zip Wire Review: A One-Note 2026 Thriller That Dangles

Amy Watson (MyAnna Buring) is a pharmaceutical researcher on the verge of something world-changing. When her partner is murdered and her ground-breaking discovery is stolen by persons unknown, she becomes the next target. The mysterious hostiles pursuing her are well-funded, well-informed, and seemingly everywhere. Her only escape route, for reasons the film explains with a shrug and a line about a "sealed perimeter," is a treacherous aerial runway - a zip wire strung across an unthinkable drop. Amy is terrified of heights. Naturally, this is the moment the universe demands she become an expert at hurtling through the air on a steel cable.

The setup is serviceable enough for a ninety-minute thriller. The problem is that Zip Wire treats its central conceit as a climax rather than a premise. The film keeps finding excuses to put Amy back on the wire, or on a ledge, or on something high and terrifying, as though the title were a contract it is legally obligated to fulfill every fifteen minutes. Characters appear and vanish with little justification. Evan (Joseph Millson) exists primarily to say exposition and look concerned. Donaldson (Saffron Burrows) is a vaguely menacing presence whose motivations remain as opaque at the credits as they were at her introduction.

Director Howard J. Ford has demonstrated a facility for lean, tense genre filmmaking before, and there are moments here where his instincts serve the material well. A mid-film sequence involving a maintenance catwalk and a flickering industrial light generates real, clammy-palmed tension. Buring, for her part, is genuinely good. She plays Amy with a grounded intelligence that the script does not always earn, and her fear of heights is rendered with a physical specificity that keeps the audience in her body even when the plot abandons logic.

But a thriller lives and dies by its architecture, and Zip Wire's is structurally unsound. The antagonists are a faceless cabal of mercenaries with no discernible ideology, personality, or plan beyond "chase the woman." The dialogue is functional at best and howlingly expository at worst. At one point, a character explains the mechanics of the zip wire to Amy as though she has never seen a cable before, which is the kind of scene that exists solely to inform the audience and insults everyone involved in the process.

The film's ratings tell a story of their own. A 7/10 on TMDb suggests an audience willing to embrace the cheese, while a 4.1/10 on IMDb reflects a more critical consensus that the execution does not hold up. Both are defensible. There is a version of Zip Wire that is a knowing, pulpy delight. This is not quite that version, but it is also not the unwatchable disaster its harshest scores imply. It is simply a film that peaks early and then spends an hour looking for a second gear it never finds. The runtime, mercifully, is a tight ninety-five minutes.

Pros

• MyAnna Buring delivers a committed, physically demanding lead performance that elevates thin material.
• The high-altitude sequences are competently staged and occasionally genuinely tense.
• The premise, however underdeveloped, has a clean, primal hook.
• At 95 minutes, it does not overstay its welcome.

Cons

• The script mistakes repetition for escalation, returning to the zip wire motif well past the point of diminishing returns.
• Antagonists are generic and under-written, draining the conflict of stakes.
• Supporting characters exist primarily to deliver exposition.
• Suspense logic is frequently sacrificed for the sake of the next set piece.

Zip Wire is a film with a great elevator pitch and a screenplay that never made it past the lobby. MyAnna Buring is the reason to watch, and she is nearly enough to justify the investment - nearly. But a thriller cannot survive on a single clever image, no matter how many times it dangles its heroine from it. Ford's latest lands somewhere in the frustrating middle: too silly to be taken seriously, too self-serious to be enjoyed as a romp. Catch it on a streaming service with low expectations and a fast-forward button, and you might find the ninety-five minutes tolerable. Otherwise, let this one stay grounded.