![‘Everest: The Other Side’ Review: A Stunning Extreme-Sports Epic Can’t Escape The Selfishness Behind The Summit [Venice]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/05091417/EverestNorth_08-1.jpg "‘Everest: The Other Side’ Review: A Stunning Extreme-Sports Epic Can’t Escape The Selfishness Behind The Summit [Venice]")
The information is widely known, integral to the plot, and discussed by the filmmakers in the film’s promotional material.
On the festival run for “The Shrouds,” a personal musing on grief following the loss of his decades-long wife, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg mentioned how he often watches films when he wants to see dead people again. Hear them again. In this way, to him, cinema is “a kind of shrouded post-death machine.” A “cemetery,” he noted. This poignant metaphor looms heavily over “Everest: The Other Side,” the latest film by Oscar-winning “Free Solo” duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin.
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The first thirty minutes of “Everest” lay out a story not too dissimilar to that of Sara Dosa’s recent “Fire of Love.” Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson are two of the world’s greatest skiers, both chasing the gravitational pull of eight-thousanders—the rare formations that rise over 8,000 meters above sea level. The duo, of course, met at Everest. She was at base camp with her family, wrestling her way out of a loveless marriage. He, tall and lanky and endlessly friendly, offered her a Coke.
She divorced her husband two weeks later and, three years on, she returned to Nepal to become one of the first two people to ever ski down Everest’s mighty neighbor, Lhotse. The other person was Jim, right behind her, cheeks as red as his skis. The world was theirs, from peak to base.
After conquering Lhotse, only one challenge remained: to summit Everest and then ski down its North Face, widely considered the toughest climb in the world. Only five people had ever summited it by the time they decided to go for it. No one had ever skied it. This is where Vasarhelyi and Chin’s latest morphs out of “Fire of Love” and into something murkier and more unsettling.
As the filmmakers capture the duo in their preparation for the big climb, we see Nelson tell the camera—and her friends behind it—of how acutely aware she is of the dangers of her passion and profession. She wants to “die young as late as possible,” she jokes, as we then watch her two young sons repeatedly grapple with the possibility of losing their mother.
“All I cared about was having my mom back,” says a red-faced 12-year-old when recounting the anxiety of seeing his mother walk out the door and into the wild. “But now I realize this is what she does and this is what she loves,” he says, each word more unsure than the one that came before.
These repeated musings on the dangerous reality of extreme sports usher in an announced tragedy: in 2022, Nelson dies in an avalanche close to the summit of Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain. In perhaps the film’s defining scene, the filmmakers soon after welcome Morrison into their home, the soft voices of their children cutting through the tension of the adults’ words. Vasarhelyi asks her then-husband, Chin (they have since divorced), how many people who once sat at their dining table and shared their food, life, and joy are now dead. Chin, in a somewhat chilling display of casualness, begins listing their names.
“I can’t tell you if I find it justifiable anymore,” Chin says to Morrison about the risks of climbing following Nelson’s death. But seven months is all it takes for Chin to find it justifiable once more, with the filmmaker packing his bags and joining Morrison in Nepal to take on the North Face of Everest. At this point, we have seen the sorrow and grief of Nelson’s two boys. We have been introduced to Chin’s children, the beautiful home the directors built together, and the pleading in the kids’ voices when their father leaves, missing birthdays and first days of school and baseball games.
Through the eyes of their loved ones, those people become enormous, even as the mountains surrounding them reduce them to specks. Under the weight of that knowledge, the almost unhuman accomplishments that follow are tinted with the sour note of selfishness. If “Free Solo” worked due to Alex Honnold’s sobering—and welcome—understanding of the inconsiderateness required to succeed in this cutthroat space, that is precisely where “Everest” fails.
The film tries to soften that blow to a certain extent, the camera lingering on pooling tears as men relay the haunting nature of loss. We see trinkets turned treasure and, for a brief moment, understand the madness of this quest as the highest form of honoring a loved one. But that precarious bubble only holds for a second, burst by the horrifying sound of tons of snow whooshing angrily down a slope, the screeching of metal hitting metal and rock hitting bone.
There is also the formal issue with “Everest,” the epitome of the Red Bull-ification of sports documentaries. While it is clear that major docs on extreme sports would not get either made or seen without the support of massive brands, there is something almost eerie about seeing the camera cut to The North Face merchandise every time the North Face of the titular mountain is mentioned on screen. Yellow tents and red jackets and beanies and caps and bottles and gadgets (and, and, and…) exposing the financial reality of a practice that sustains itself on the cha-ching of high-tech gear and the expendability of human life. This is never clearer than when “Everest” briefly broaches the relationship between climbers—mainly American, majorly white, inevitably sponsored—and Nepalese sherpas.
The film acknowledges the exploitative nature of this particular economy but never fully confronts it. Morrison and Chin frequently express their gratitude and admiration for the local men risking their lives to make their dream—and, let’s be honest, well-paid jobs—work, but “Everest” only offers a quick, insufficient moment of consideration for the nature of that profession, one that sees a disproportionate number of locals shortchanged, maimed, and killed for the thrills of the wealthy global North. And while the great, victorious climax of Vasarhelyi and Chin’s shot-for-IMAX epic is drenched in weep-inducing emotion, the film sits in an uncomfortable, verging-on-hypocritical middle ground, oddly lacking self-awareness even as it believes it is built on it. [C-]
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Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire.
