'127 Hours' causes audience fainting

Three audience members reportedly passed out at a Toronto screening of Danny Boyle's latest film 127 Hours.

The movie follows climber Aron Ralston's days-long ordeal trapped under a boulder in the mountains of Utah. Ralston, played by James Franco, is forced to amputate his own arm to free himself.

Boyle shows Ralston breaking his arm with a rock, working through the flesh with a blunt knife then cutting tendons with pliers.

TheWrap film critic John H. Fort claimed that he witnessed three people faint and one have a seizure at the movie's Toronto Film Festival premiere.

He said: "Make no mistake, the scenes of Aron Ralston taking off his own arm to free himself after a fall are among the most realistic of graphic gore ever put on film, and not for the faint of heart.

"You could clearly see people in shock, struggling to stay in their seats, working to get past the intensity of what was going on in front of them. The sequence is never gratuitous, just very realistic... These were clearly audience members who could not take it."

Ralston himself admitted that he found it difficult to view Boyle's on-screen recreation: "The experience of the very gruesome arm-removing [was], like, 'Whoa, I can't believe we're watching this!' I was ecstatic to be getting out of there."