'Stormbound’ review: Jaw-dropping IMAX doc journeys into the eye of the storm

Dir: Miko Lim. US. 2026. 96mins

In January 2023, Jeff Gammons was told that he needed a second kidney transplant, 14 years after the first had saved his life. That news was not enough, however, to stop him from indulging his passion for chasing hurricanes and tornadoes across the United States. Miko Lim’s immersive documentary follows Jeff and his wife, Sara, as they race the storms and the clock in the months ahead of the planned surgery. While it may be somewhat emotionally heavy-handed in joining the dots between the tempests that rage in Jeff’s’ personal life and those he chases on the ground, Stormbound is visually jaw-dropping as it takes the viewer straight into the eye of the storm.

Astonishing ‘how did they do that?’ photography takes us inside a tornado

Stormbound premiered at SXSW, where it won a special jury award in the documentary feature competition, and next travels to CPH:DOX. An opening caption makes the point that no visual effects have been used in the making of the film, which counts Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay among its producers. The incredible sequences captured by Jeff, Sara and cinematographer Richard Hama are worth the price of admission. The film is shot with IMAX cameras and should do well in that format, with footage of extreme weather well-suited to that epic scale.

Director Lim is himself a keen outdoorsman, and previously made shorts including 2022’s free-dive portrait Ocean Mother. Working alongside fellow editors Leslie Jones and Nick Pezzillo, he shows a strong eye for detail and pace, effectively weaving in Jeff’s own archive footage to highlight the man’s longstanding love of weather. Now in his late 40s, Jeff has been fascinated by storms since he was a child and has made a career photographing and filming them. His footage from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, taken from inside (and outside) Biloxi’s Mississippi Coliseum, is both an incredible piece of environmental filmmaking and an essential historical document.

Jeff’s endeavours are made all the more impressive by the fact that he has suffered from serious health problems his entire life, facing childhood cancer, paralysis, kidney disease and open heart surgery resulting in the fitting of a mechanical valve. When Jeff was filming Katrina, he was in stage 5 kidney failure, giving himself dialysis in the Coliseum’s storage closet. His bloody-minded grit is captured in Colin Stetson’s score, which combines soaring classical notes with gruffer, edgier rock tones, speaking to the beauty and foolhardiness of Jeff’s pursuits. (There can be no escaping the fact that this is a dangerous lifestyle, and Jeff’s 12-year-old son is not included in the documentary.)

But when we watch the footage of supercells forming over Nebraska or twisters touching down in Oklahoma, there’s a real sense of kinship. Storms are dangerous and unpredictable – and the film is certainly not glib about their destructive capabilities and threat to life – but there is a spellbinding atistry to their movements. Astonishing ‘how did they do that?’ photography takes us inside a tornado, high into the swirling, dusty movements of a hurricane; satellite footage makes plain their scale and power.

Interviews with an often tearful yet unfailingly supportive Sara alongside Jeff’s mother, who has kept the callipers he had to wear as a child, make it clear that he has been through an unrelenting health ordeal, one that has taken an enormous physical and mental toll. Lim can, however, push the connection between Jeff’s health and his work a little too hard, particularly when a slow fade sees a storm rage through an operating theatre, and it can feel like being spoonfed a message that is entirely obvious.

There is the palpable sense that, in chasing these monster storms, Jeff is attempting to understand them, to harness their elemental power – to, in effect, control the uncontrollable. For Jeff, storm chasing means escape, freedom from a body that continues to fail him. Knowing that, footage of him standing directly in the path of a hurricane, holding on to his SUV as the wind lifts him off the ground, makes for a powerful, poignant image.