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A subject of considerable gossip in the documentary inner circle, the high-profile breakup of Oscar-winning mountaineer-filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi was bound to haunt their latest project, the exhilarating “Everest: The Other Side” for NatGeo. It’s the tense and vertiginously shot nonfiction chronicle of a grief-stricken alpine climber and skier, Jim Morrison, as he attempts to scale Everest’s North Face. To the naked eye, you can’t really say they’re using him as therapy. But aren’t they?
Until Morrison’s record-breaking trek, only five people had successfully summited, and exactly zero had skied this Chinese-facing side of the world’s highest mountain. While history will tell you that Morrison safely hit his apogee and survived the project, the audience nonetheless remains in terrified, clammy doubt as Morrison endures unforgiving avalanches, a 9,000-vertical-foot corridor of bulletproof ice, and a shitstorm of personal tragedies in the run-up.
Those tragedies include the dissolution of Morrison’s shared ambition to traverse the North Face when his partner (spoiler alert? Not really), elite ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson, died in 2022. They had been preparing to take on the North Face during COVID when Nelson, skiing with her husband down the Manasalu summit in Nepal, was struck by an avalanche that caused her to fall approximately 5,900 feet. It’s a nightmarish, disaster-movie jump scare when a massive sheet of ice dislodges, taking Nelson down with it. Already, Morrison had brought heavy baggage worthy of its own emotional sherpa up the mountain: His first wife and his two children died in an airplane accident in 2011.
Part of the frustration and fascination of these climbing docs is that the filmmakers can never quite answer the question of why these people — tenacious, but undoubtedly masochistic — carry on and up the mountain again and again. You spent much of “Free Solo” wondering if Alex Honnold was going to plunge to his death off the face of El Capitan more than once, despite a supportive but exasperated partner standing by at base camp. The truth is, there is no answer. It’s not glory, because despite the painstaking preparations, the endgame is far less calculated, and it doesn’t solve your problems back on Earth. “The things we do for fun,” Morrison mutters to himself as GoPro footage captures him trudging through a particularly icy crevasse down Everest. When you hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up it.
Whatever dramas had been unfolding between Vasarhelyi and Chin at the time (their break-up had been occurring during production) are kept offscreen, but they still gnaw at the edges of what is a climbing-doc spectacle at 29,000 feet, but a considered relationship story down at sea level. (2015’s “Meru,” in which Chin scaled a Himalayan mountain amid much tension-supplying disaster, gave us a taste of the wear and tear these ascents put on their relationship.)
Nelson’s first and only marriage cratered beneath her own career-long death drive, a relationship where a thousand tiny hairpin cracks in the ice eventually split them in half. That led her into her relationship with Morrison, one that made a lot more sense: two climbers looking in the same direction toward the same passion. Imagine caring as much about anything as these two do about skiing and climbing. After Nelson’s death, in 2023, Morrison decides to carry out their shared dream of ascending the North Face; her surviving now-teenaged kids are almost unnervingly undismayed and even supportive. This time, there’s still no guarantee of making it down alive, either.
But he’s not lacking in confidence, because there’s precedent for his potential success. In 2018, Morrison and Nelson became the first people to ski down the Lhotse Couloir of Everest’s fourth-highest mountain, sparking a mutual, obsessive, more-conscious-than-they’d-admit craving to die young before they’re too old.
Broken legs, overwhelming monsoons, rising temperatures, dwindling oxygen, and a narrowing climbing season all plague Morrison, Chin, and their team’s ascent — which goes all wrong during the 2023 expedition, but that doesn’t stop them from making their way up the North Face yet again two years later. Cinematographers Clair Popkin, Christopher Murphy, and Chin deploy the arsenal of GoPros, drone footage, and telescopic lenses to epically scale up and widen the canvas of Morrison’s expedition — and induce stomach flips in the audience as the specters and presentiments of yet another avalanche feel in perilous proximity. By the time Morrison reaches the tip-top of the mountain, it’s hard not to feel awed by the resilience of the human spirit, despite all the cliches attached to it. And yet he still has to ski back down, in an intimately suffocating high-wire sequence.
The counterbalance of the film‘s plangent exploration of grief, and the carefully studied emotional ethnography of its subjects, including the charming Nepalese Sherpa Yukta, keep “Everest: The Other Side” from ever veering into the kind of spectacle-driven NatGeo you’d nod off to on streaming television. This is not soothing nature-doc viewing, but instead, a clear-eyed stare into the face of death — with a dash of marital angst, too. Chin and Vasarhelyi’s greatest achievement is managing to mine and mount suspense even when the climax is already foretold — and in the bluntly personal, home-hitting terms through which they tell another man’s story.
Grade: B+
“Everest: The Other Side” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. National Geographic will open the film in theaters starting October 30.
English (US) ·