Ooft!

Off The Rails is a documentary about a group of young guys in Guildford into parkour. The film follows their story from 15 to 22, showing the ups and downs of their lives as they try to turn their passion into a career.

What this film is really about is class. It’s about the inescapability of class, and how every step forward is met with three pushes back. Yet it’s also a defiantly hopeful film, because despite these challenges (and by challenges, I mean god awful things that happen), the young men at the centre of the film continue to push, to pick themselves up, to dream of a better future for themselves, and try to create it. And regardless of success or failure, they have each other, bonds of friendship through thick and thin.

What I liked most was the way the documentary didn’t try to separate the good and the bad out. Parkour is a healthy outlet for their energy, keeps them fit, gives them a sense of athletic achievement; it’s empowering, it allows them to traverse and interact with their city in a way that gives them ownership of the place they live; it gives them an appreciation and love of architecture; it allows them to see vistas few ever would. At the same time, it’s an adrenaline hit that can become addictive, and the line between developing your skills and escalating for the rush blurs quickly; it’s spectacle, and as spectacle is subject to the pressure and demands of an audience; its transgressive nature puts it in conflict with the law, and can end up narrowing life options, rather than expanding them; it comes with genuine risk of injury and death. All of these things co-exist at the same time, and are inseparable from each other. This is not a story of how a positive thing got taken too far and became a negative thing, it’s far more complex than that.

I really identified with the guys, Rikke, Aiden, Nye, Alex and Owen. Growing up in a shithole town, no prospects, hating school. You feel like a rat scratching at a wall. While I was able to hook on to my education to get me out of there, Rikke and Aiden leave school without any qualifications. The options are shit work, no work, drink, drugs, and the noose. There seems to be no way to actually change your life. But when a clip of them doing parkour goes viral, they become YouTube stars. Suddenly the possibility of making a living doing what they love seems possible.

But all the market forces come into play. Making a YouTube channel takes an enormous amount of work, and you are entirely dependent on the algorithm and monetisation to make any income. While there are flashes of success like booking a North Face ad photoshoot, you have no hourly rate, no benefits, no sick pay. Plus, you now have the appearance of success, with millions of views, so no one can believe it when you are still unable to afford to move out your parent’s house. And the algorithm, the audience, always demand fresh content, the bigger and more extreme the better.

Rikke and Aiden are very conscientious about the impact they have on their audience, they stress that they are effectively athletes, who have practiced and practiced to be able to do what they do. Yet that can never negate that there will always be viewers willing to emulate their most dangerous stunts without the proper precautions. And they themselves are pushed, by the nature of the medium, to do the most attention-grabbing stuff. They take to train surfing, as it brings in the most views, but as one guy points out, that’s not really about parkour skill, because the train is in control. One jolt and it’s all over, doesn’t matter how good you are. And as more and more legal problems mount in the UK, it means going abroad to do their surfs, where they are less familiar with the routes, the schedules, the dangers.

This film couldn’t have asked for a better marriage of subject and theme with young working class men trying to jump over walls, an act of elation, hope and defiance, but with no promise of what is on the other side.