In the annals of Formula 1, where egos roar louder than engines and tragedy lurks like a badly timed pit stop, the 2025 documentary Hill (Sky Documentaries, July 2, 9pm) emerges as a triumph of introspection over horsepower. Directed by Alex Holmes with the precision of a Williams mechanic, this 90-minute gem polishes the tarnished legacy of Damon Hill, a man who, as he confesses in his splendidly candid autobiography Watching the Wheels, never even wanted to be a racing driver. Yet, like a reluctant gladiator thrust into the Colosseum, he carved a world championship from the wreckage of his father’s shadow. And, my word, doesn’t this film make you glad he did?
Clive James, that maestro of the wry aside, once described Hill’s prose in Watching the Wheels as "breathing speed while remaining brilliant in its restraint". The documentary takes this baton and sprints, weaving a narrative so taut it could double as a suspension cable. Holmes, no stranger to wringing drama from real life (Maiden, The Rig), jettisons the tired sports-doc trope of endless slow-motion crashes for something far rarer: a psychological excavation of a man who raced not for glory, but to outrun his own ghosts. The editing, courtesy of Cinzia Baldessari, is a masterclass in temporal sleight-of-hand, juxtaposing grainy home videos of a young Damon—grinning under the weight of his father Graham’s charisma—with the steely-eyed F1 contender of the ‘90s. One moment, we’re watching a boy idolise his two-time champion father; the next, we’re at Suzuka 1996, where Damon clinches the title, and the cinema audience, as one Letterboxd punter noted, erupts like they’ve just seen Lazarus take the chequered flag. It’s a structural gambit that mirrors the non-linear chaos of memory itself, and it works with the elegance of a perfectly executed chicane.
What elevates Hill above the usual sporting hagiography—those banal PR puff pieces that litter the genre like discarded Pirelli slicks—is the unfiltered openness of Damon and his wife, Georgie. The film, wisely, ditches talking heads like Patrick Head and Adrian Newey to focus solely on the Hills, a decision producer Simon Lazenby defends as keeping the “unique family story” pure. Georgie, the film’s quiet MVP, is a revelation, her recollections as sharp as a gear shift and twice as poignant. “He’s one of the saddest people I’ve ever met,” she says of her husband, a line that lands like a gut punch in a film that dares to linger on Damon’s melancholy. Her account of their courtship—Damon, leather-clad and brooding on a motorbike, a Hamlet on two wheels—echoes the raw honesty of Watching the Wheels, where Hill admits to feeling he “would like to have been with [his father] on the plane” after Graham’s 1975 crash.
That tragedy, which left the Hill family penniless and Damon adrift at 15, is the fulcrum of his mental journey, and the documentary doesn’t shy away from its weight. Instead, it leans in, showing a man who, as he writes in his book, was “angry at the world” but channelled that rage into a determination Georgie calls unmatched. Holmes and Baldessari’s editing doesn’t just narrate; it interrogates. A haunting superimposition of Graham’s face over Damon’s visor as he tears around a track is both a visual poem and a psychological dagger, suggesting a son forever racing in his father’s reflection.
It’s a touch too on-the-nose, perhaps, but forgivable when the film so deftly balances such flourishes with rawer moments—like Georgie’s memory of Ayrton Senna’s kindness hours before his fatal 1994 Imola crash, or Damon’s admission of suicidal thoughts post-Graham’s death. These aren’t mere anecdotes; they’re the scaffolding of a man rebuilding himself lap by lap, a theme Watching the Wheels explores with similar candour as Hill dissects his “conditional confidence and the thin ledge” of his 1993 psyche.
If Hill has a flaw, it’s that it occasionally feels like a 90-minute sprint when a longer race might have let us linger in Damon’s quieter moments—say, his charity work for Down’s Syndrome, inspired by his son Oliver, or his post-racing therapy, which he mentions in both book and film. But this is a quibble. The documentary, like Hill’s autobiography, is a refreshingly honest account of a man who didn’t just win races but wrestled with a legacy that nearly broke him. It’s a film that makes you cheer not for the podium, but for the man who, as Georgie so perfectly puts it, was “joking around” on the surface while carrying a sadness deep enough to drown in. In an era of sanitised sports docs, Hill is a glorious anomaly: a story of speed that dares to slow down and feel.