There's a brutal inevitability about this account of the 1936 attempt on the unclimbed north face of the Eiger: we know these clean-cut young alpinists are not coming off the mountain alive.

Benno Fürmann and Florian Lukas play Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser, two young Bavarian soldiers who join the feverish, ideologically inspired race to conquer the crag and receive medals from Hitler at the Olympic games.

Stölzl films their harrowing ordeal out on the "Murderwall" with tremendous skill, but the rest of his movie is lumpen to say the least, soft-pedalling on the politics and using an increasingly implausible romantic subplot as the narrative motor.