Earlier on this year, I developed a particularly ardent passion for Sagarmatha or, as it is more commonly known, Mount Everest. After reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a critical-piece-turned-memoir about the 1996 accident that claimed eight lives, I tore through other accounts of the same expedition, comparing notes, perspectives, insights, weighing in on the feuds and vindictive aftermath of one of the deadliest nights on the tallest peak in the world. It seemed fitting for me, then, that 2026 should bare not one, but two films focused on the great mountain – albeit very different ones.
Everest: The Other Side, a documentary directed by then spouses Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, was the first for me, recounting elite mountaineer Jim Morrison’s ski descent on the deadlier and less frequented North Side. It’s a classic success story from planning through to execution, but one dotted with the heavy weight of tragedy and grief – early on in the documentary, Morrison’s partner both in life and project, Hilaree Nelson, is killed in an avalanche, ostensibly captured on camera. It is a simultaneously dragged out yet quick process that one need only blink to miss it. What is it exactly that we have witnessed here? There is no warning, nor explanation. But then, Morrison is lighting candles next to a blown-up photo of her face and grieving both his partner and the project they had planned together. As close friends with their subject, Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi are present often onscreen, and at times, Everest: The Other Side veers dangerously close to voyeurism, as Chin welcomes Morrison into his home shortly after Hilaree’s death and the latter dissolves into his arms, sobbing.
Yet the care between friends is evident here, though at times it is unclear who exactly has made directional choices – Chin is intent on helping Morrison reach his goal, while Chai Vasarhelyi takes a prudent step back, asking the questions us mortals can only stammer out to these elite daredevils: why? Why, when there has been so much suffering already? Why, when half the people who have sat at our dinner table are now dead?
The response, which Morrison, Chin and various others try to articulate throughout (and a question that incessantly comes up in any of the Everest memoir accounts you can get your hands on), is something that transcends mere words. It is a feeling, a sensation, a force that pulls you to the top, even when woe lies ahead and in your wake. And as the camera glides beautifully across the face of the mountain, dazzling snow, misty mountaintops, and smiling faces basking in the glow of success, one realises that Chin and Vasarhelyi have done an excellent job in justifying it.
Everest: The Other Side screened at the London Film Festival and will be released in UK cinemas 30 October 2026.
