10 Movie Scenes That Will Give You Vertigo

While the second Mission Impossible film opened with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt free-climbing an impressive overhanging cliff, the fourth instalment had an even more vertigo-inducing scene.

Hunt and his team travel to Dubai to retrieve launch codes to stop a nuclear war between the US and Russia. To achieve this, they need to access servers on the 130th floor of the Burj Khalifa and can only enter from the outside.

Using a pair of special suction gloves, Hunt free climbs up the glass, leaving the building on the 123rd floor. One of the gloves terrifyingly starts to malfunction, so he tosses it, only just catching himself with the remaining one when he falls while cutting the glass.

His return journey is no less frightening, rappelling and running down the side of the building, leaping back towards the window, with Brandt only just catching him by his ankle.

Cruise insisted on doing the stunt himself, wearing a harness that was digitally edited out in post-production. He was repeatedly slammed into the building by strong crosswinds during filming, and the scene was considered to be so dangerous the production team struggled to find an insurance company to cover it.

Director Brad Bird made full use of filming in IMAX, increasing the unsettling effect of the height by reflecting the traffic below in the glass, and also showing the glass warping slightly when Cruise pressed down on it, making it seem more unstable and likely to break.