Video: Death-Defying Leaps Atop NYC High Rise Captured By Filmmaker

NEW YORK CITY — A man who was apparently stuck atop a 23-story Financial District building took a series of death-defying leaps to reach a window, as seen in a viral video.

The video posted by Emmy Award-winning film director Erik Ljung shows a man near the roof of West 90 St., a landmarked apartment building.

The man, who is wearing a suit and dress shoes, appears to talk on a phone before he runs across five awnings, to the shock and surprise of people across the street.

"It's like he's doing parkour," a person can be heard saying on the video.

Patch reached out the building's management and Ljung for comment, but neither replied as of publication.

Ljung's Instagram post provides more context, but leaves the all-important questions of how this man ended up on the roof and why he had to take those leaps unanswered.

Indeed, the footage itself actually picked up mid-action, according to his post.

"I have no idea what dude was doing," he wrote. "He was already hopping around from awning to awning when we first saw him."

The footage picks up as the man wanders around at the corner of the building's roof.

He then returns to the direction from which he made his first series of leaps, Ljung wrote.

"Here he goes," someone on the video says.

"What is he doing?" another says.

"It's so windy outside too," yet one more person chimes in.

The man's misadventure ends as someone opens a window for him to get inside.

"New York City, baby," one of the onlookers says.

The video, when shared on Reddit, drew a mix of surprise, jokes and references to the parkour skit from "The Office."

"Safe to assume this was not his first time doing this…looks like the stop-and-go timing of Mario trying to run through Bowser’s castle," one poster wrote.

"Man was just trying to get to his bathroom," another wrote.

"PARKOUR PARKOUR," a poster wrote.

"Wonder what he was smoking. He seemed pretty high," went yet another post.

Some Reddit posters questioned whether it was staged, which Ljung — a documentary film maker who has worked on Netflix's “Making a Murderer” and Al Jazeera’s “Fault Lines” — shot down.

"Def not staged," Ljung wrote. "We are filming at the building across the street and we were looking out the window to see if there was gonna be any break in the clouds and saw this."