Michael Bay’s visceral parkour doc ‘We Are Storror’ is a nail-biting thrill ride

There’s something visceral about the thrills of parkour, an idea made crystal clear during one of the movie’s opening montages, during which its subjects hop between rooftops on all fours. They seem to hover in the air for the briefest of moments. Humans have long looked to the skies and imagined flying, and perhaps the closest they’ve come is these hairbrained superheroes, who capture themselves in the visage of famous comic book mainstays like Batman (one scene in particular, during a lightning storm, yields silhouetted shots of the group members in midair, which resemble the cover of the famous Frank Miller graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns).

Structurally, the movie is bookended by two enormously hazardous stunt routines at the same Portuguese location—a series of steep mountain side steps reinforced with steel handrails. The first time the group attempts to descend this cliffside, choreographed and in unison, disaster strikes, as a friend accompanying them suffers a massive fall. Mere minutes into the movie, we’re treated to the gory sight of bone protruding through flesh. The group understandably abandons the mission right there and then, but by the time they return near the end of We Are Storror, they’ve taken us on what feels like a lifelong journey.

As a subject, parkour—the art of moving creatively between locations—feels not only suited to Bay’s sensibilities, as a maximalist thrill-seeker, but to the sensibilities of cinema in general. The medium was arguably birthed through the photographic experiments of Eadward Muybridge, whose famous series of pictures of a jockey on a horse sought to figure out whether a horse’s hooves all left the ground at the same time. In a sense, the movies were born of the desire to capture brief moments of flight. Intentionally or otherwise, We Are Storror harkens back to the days of early image-making on numerous occasions. One stunt involves the group queuing up and hopping along a rooftop designed with alternating beams and openings, and is shot from the ground-level, gazing up at their shapes in the distance. The members are all so in-sync that you could swear you were looking at an image of one person across different phases of motion as seen in a zoetrope or phenakistiscope—early animation devices that worked like flip books, which created the illusion of motion when viewed through slits.

Storror is a professional parkour and specialist stunt performance team.

Courtesy of storror.com

The stunts performed by Storror, however, are very real, and incredibly precarious. No harnesses. No safety nets. One wrong move or false landing could spell certain doom, and the knowledge that all seven members are still alive and (mostly) in one piece doesn’t lessen the hair-raising tension of each stunt. As they travel across Malta, Thailand, India, Hong Kong, Bulgaria and elsewhere in search of new surfaces to scale, brief interview segments with the team (made up of two pairs of brothers and three other friends) endear us to them as individuals, and provide multifaceted insight into their worlds. Their obsessions are born of a combination of youthful hedonism and, on some level, political rebellion against a lack of public spaces in an increasingly privatized world.

Their actions aren’t necessarily altruistic (though they do hope to inspire people to take liberating risks). However, their relationship to city architecture, street-level details and natural landscapes alike is a vital part of the movie’s telling. A group of westerners traversing the Global South and making a ruckus might understandably raise eyebrows, but Storror has also amassed fans all over the world, and what they’re tapping into with their petty rule-breaking is much more primal than the modern, constructed notions of cultural voyeurism, of which one might accuse them. (It’s hard to say they’re exotifying a location when they are what’s exotic about their footage.)

At one point, their sport/artform seems to evolve when they develop a slippery routine down the side of a steep, sandy quarry, whose open cliff face features millions of years’ of weathering and rocky strata. For the geologically inclined, this sedimentation will likely bring to mind eons of evolution and transformation—the culmination of which involves seven ill-advised exhibitionists kicking, flipping, and front rolling off the rocky surface. It’s ludicrous, yet beautiful. Boys will be boys, but there’s something vulnerable about seven best friends putting their bodies on the line in such close proximity: When the adrenaline proves too much for one of them, he has a panic attack, and the others circle around to comfort him.

The Storror team.

Courtesy of storror.com

The disorienting pressure-and-release experienced by the troupe is translated aesthetically too. The aforementioned quarry, for instance, is introduced via spinning shots of a drone that travels in unexpected ways (à la Bay’s recent chase film Ambulance), shimmying between the body and arm of a bulldozer before zipping up in the air to reveal an enormous sense of scale. Each new location is introduced in a similar manner, making it dizzying and terrifying, as the movie’s montage structure—courtesy of editors Michael Engelken and Jan Supa—yanks us between scenes, countries and points in time at breakneck speed, while Lorne Balfe’s pulsating electronic score adds a rush of momentum.

With all the camaraderie of an army unit, the Storror boys make for a perfect subject for the military-obsessed Bay, who taps into all the reasons parkour isn’t just cinematic—and boy, is it ever—but like cinema itself. It’s an act of creation built on strategizing, choreographing and planning, and numerous behind-the-scenes shots even feature the group members laying down marks in chalk and tape for them to hit with their jumps, the way one might mark the floor of a film set to coordinate an actor’s movement. And of course, there’s the visual element too. Parkour is a dazzling sight, and the members of Storror seek to capture it in poetic ways, at times recalling the gorgeous, slow-motion tableaus of Hong Kong action maestro John Woo (foreground pigeons and all).

Nail-biting, jaw-dropping, and simply beautiful, We Are Storror is Bay’s Broyaanisqatsi—a massive, globe-hopping piece of Godfrey Reggio-esque nonfiction, whose vistas of life in motion, or hanging by a thread, transform the frame into a mirror. It’s the kind of movie that forces you to reflect on everything from aging and friendship, to the most fundamental, lizard-brain emotions and impulses human beings are capable of experiencing.