Written and directed by Danny Boyle (with Simon Beaufoy also working on the screenplay), 127 Hours is a dramatisation of Aron Ralston’s escape from Bluejohn Canyon in 2003. An experienced canyoneer, Ralston was pinned by a boulder for five days before amputating his arm and hiking eleven miles to rescue. While this subject matter is striking it’s not an immediately cinematic prospect but Boyle comes up with an ingenious formal solution and aesthetic conceit. Apart from a brief preamble in which Ralston, played by James Franco, makes his way to the canyon, the entirety of the film contrasts the blunt fact of his entrapment with the hyper-kinetic intensity of an world that was almost – but not quite – connected enough for him to receive instant assistance. This allows Boyle to bring his trademark hyper-kineticism into what might otherwise be a fairly grim chamber drama. We see his psychedelic style in the opening credits, which use split screens and manic montage to position Ralston’s story against a rapidly connecting world, and then again in the opening scenes, where he imbues the American west with the dayglo-techno intensity of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.

This turns Ralston’s crevice into a fissure that is only just out of reach of an exponentially technologising world. When Ralston first falls he is wearing state-of-the-art headphones and his first response is to stare up at the jetstream of a plane passing overhead, the ether of satellite signals both tantalisingly close and agonisingly far. His digital camera is almost a direct communication device – he uses it to take selfies with a pair of girls he meets  before the accident, selfies that Boyle swoops off to the left of the screen as if they’re being uploaded to the clouds that hang high above the desert. Ralston is also surrounded by a host of devices – credit card, multi-purpose knife, digital watch, digital camera – that don’t quite put him on the grid or add up to total connectivity. The recurring shots of ants going about their hive mind on the floors of the canyon gestures towards a human society that is about to become networked but that hasn’t penetrated this particular outpost just yet.

Ralston’s experience, while traumatic in itself, thus speaks to a broader reconfiguration of the human body in the new millennium. Much of the film has a GoPro aesthetic in which the camera feels untethered from the hands – or rather, in which the eyes are no longer the primary sense organ driving the cinematic experience. With one hand trapped beneath the boulder and the other operating all his digital devices, Ralston experiences vertiginous oscillations between his eyes, his hands and his other senses. In one of the most visceral scenes in the film he takes out both of his contact lenses and eats them for their nutrient value. We see this dissociation of the senses from the eyes – the waning of the cinematic model of senses as servants to the eye – in the opening scenes, when Ralston’s disembodied hands comb their way through his cupboards in search of the knife with which one will eventually amputate the other. A similar uncanniness pervades his last act in the canyon – photographing his dismembered hand as it sits wedged beneath the fateful boulder.

This dislocation of eyes from body, and the subsequent collapse of classical cinematic language, often seems to project Ralston into the medial future. To keep himself occupied he maintains a video diary but as the days go by his “updates” become ever more flamboyant, anticipating the rise of YouTube vlogging, as he starts to hallucinate an audience, replete with canned laughter, and even imagines conversations with a second canyon-trapped vlogger. That sense of futurity offsets the periodic flashbacks – or rather converges with them to evoke a growing singularity and simultaneity just beyond the canyon walls. In one, Ralston recalls (or imagines) his mother leaving a message on his home answering machine as he listens to (or ignores) her voice. In another, he thinks back to the last recorded image of him, on the security camera at the hiking store where he works, as he walks out for the last time without telling any of his collagues where is going. The most resonant of these “flashbacks” is a memory of his family “watching” his sister play piano on a direct camera-TV loop. She’s there in the lounge room, tinkling away on her instrument, but his family are watching it on the television screen. Boyle keeps coming back to this memory of the future, using it to contour the traumatic facticity and blunt materiality of Ralston’s entrapment.

Interestingly that facticity sometimes turns 127 Hours into a late artefact of the two dominant horror genres of the 2010s – torture porn and found footage. The torture porn is clearly there in the event it’s all heading towards – Ralston amputating his own hand – and there’s more than a touch of the Saw franchise in this vision of an individual who is forced to torture himself to avoid a greater bodily trauma (Ralston’s autobiography was titled Between a Rock and a Hard Place). Yet Boyle also leans into the glitch and fuzz of found footage; it’s not hard to imagine the film as found footage horror, trapping us in the camera in the same way that Ralston is trapped in the gorge. Boyle redirects that fractious aesthetic outwards, couching Ralston’s predicament in increasingly frenzied “global” montage sequences in the vein of Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi, until the proliferation of manic cuts and hyperactive split screens seems to embed Ralston’s self-amputation in the syntax of the film itself.

There’s also something poignant, or at least resonant, about Franco’s isolation in this film. This would be one of his last really big roles before he retreated to monadic auteurism in the early 2010s and was exiled from the Hollywood film community in the late 2010s. You feel that process in an incipient way here, since for all that Boyle peppers the film with other actors and characters, they quickly collapse into a blur of simultaneity, reduced to so many facets of Ralston’s predicament and Franco’s screen persona. Likewise, Franco’s good looks, the libidinal motor engine of so much of his auteurist self-regard over the subsequent decade, are twisted and distorted by Boyle until they involute and turn back upon themselves. When I picture the Franco of the 2010s it’s first and foremost by way of the Gothic facial configurations on display here. Along with This is the End, released a few years later, it marks an end point for the bromance brat pack, an apostrophe to the convivial masculinity of the previous decade, as it gives way to something more anxious, unsettled and provisional.