The Climb starts with a literal climb. Best friends Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) are biking somewhere in France, up a mountain talking about Kyle impending nuptials where Mike is going to be the best man. The scene builds up as they bike up and ends with the revelation that Mike slept with Kyle's fiancée. The deadpan way Covina reveals that and the funny yet completely heartbreaking way Marvin reacts sets the tone for this abrasive comedy of male friendship...
The Climb is comprised of long elaborate talk scenes, that play like a series of one act plays. Similar to that first scene I described, we get several more as Kyle and Mike approach and reproach each other, fall in and out and friendship and tangle and untangle with each others’ family members. All of the scenes carry the same caustic humour and outlandish and even mean situations. You can also see how the genesis of this was a short film of the same name, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
Covino’s direction is well attuned to the actors movements through the set thus enabling the delivery of the high concept kooky situations. While the script, written by Covino and Marvin, is funny if a bit navel gazing, these two men seems to be only obsessed with each other and their sometimes toxic sometimes sweet but always dysfunctional friendship. Everyone else in their lives is secondary no matter how close a bond they have - mother, wife, son.
I laughed a few times - particularly in a long scene where a drunken Mike tries to get Kyle’s also drunk fiancee (Gayle Rankin) to sleep with him in order to break them up. But the characters are so off putting and just plain awful to each other and everyone around them, that by the end I was queasy and regretful of all my laughs.