Editor’s note: This review was originally published during the 2026 Venice Film Festival. NatGeo has released this film in theaters from October 30.
The subject of much gossip in documentarian inner circles, the high-profile breakup of Oscar-winning mountaineer-filmmaker Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi was set to haunt her latest project, NatGeo’s thriller “Everest: The Other Side.” It is a tense and dizzyingly shot nonfiction chronicle of a scrappy alpine climber and skier, Jim Morrison, as he attempts to climb the North Face of Everest. With the naked eye, you can’t really tell that they are using it as therapy. But aren’t they?
Until Morrison’s record-breaking trek, only five people had successfully climbed the summit, and absolutely zero people had ever skied the Chinese-facing side of the world’s highest mountain. While history will tell you that Morrison safely reached his peak and survived the project, viewers remain in frightened, vague suspense as Morrison endured a storm of unforgiving avalanches, 9,000-vertical-foot corridors of bulletproof ice, and personal tragedies.
Those tragedies include the disruption of Morrison’s shared ambition to summit the North Face when his partner (spoiler alert? Not really), elite ski mountaineer Hilarie Nelson, died in 2022. They were preparing to summit the North Face during COVID when Nelson, skiing with her husband on Manaslu Peak in Nepal, was hit by an avalanche, plunging her about 5,900 feet. It’s a nightmarish, disaster-movie jump scare when a giant sheet of ice crumbles and takes Nelson down with it. Already, Morrison had carried a heavy burden for his emotional Sherpa: His first wife and two of their children died in a plane crash in 2011.
Part of the frustration and charm of these climbing documents is that the filmmakers can never answer the question of why these people – determined, but undoubtedly masochistic – climb up and down the mountain again and again. You spent much of “Free Solo” wondering whether Alex Honnold was going to fall to his death on the face of El Capitan more than once, despite having a supportive but desperate companion standing by at base camp. The truth is, there is no answer to this. This is no glory, because despite hard preparations, the end game is very little calculated, and it does not solve your problems on earth. GoPro footage captures Morrison walking down a particularly icy crevasse below Everest, “The things we do for fun,” he mutters to himself. When you reach the lowest level, there is no way left but to go up.
Whatever drama was unfolding between Vassarhelyi and Chin at the time (they were breaking up during production) has been kept offscreen, but they still gnaw at the edges of climbing-dock spectacle at 29,000 feet, but the story of a well-intentioned relationship at sea level. (In 2015’s “Meru,” in which Chin climbed the Himalayan mountains amid a high-stress disaster, we got a taste of the wear and tear on their relationship through these ups and downs.)
Nelson’s first and only marriage crumbled beneath his own career-long death march, a relationship where a thousand tiny hairpin cracks in the ice eventually split them in half. This led him to his relationship with Morrison, which made much more sense: two climbers looking in the same direction toward the same passion. Imagine these two caring about anything as much as skiing and climbing. After Nelson’s death, in 2023, Morrison decided to pursue their shared dream of climbing the North Face; Her surviving teenage children are almost entirely unafraid and even supportive. This time, there’s still no guarantee of making it out alive.
But they are not lacking in confidence, as there is precedent for their potential success. In 2018, Morrison and Nelson became the first people to ski the Lhotse Couloir on Everest, the fourth-highest mountain, creating a mutual, passionate, and more conscious—desire between them that they admit—longing to die young before getting too old.
Broken legs, fierce monsoons, rising temperatures, dwindling oxygen, and a waning climbing season all hinder Morrison, Chin, and their team’s climb — which goes horribly wrong during the 2023 expedition, but that doesn’t stop them from reaching the North Face again two years later. Cinematographers Claire Popkin, Christopher Murphy and Chin deploy an arsenal of GoPros, drone footage and telescopic lenses to momentarily zoom in and widen the canvas of Morrison’s campaign – and leave viewers’ stomachs churning as they feel the onslaught of another avalanche and the presences in dangerous proximity. By the time Morrison reaches the top of the mountain, it’s hard not to be amazed by the resilience of the human spirit, despite all the cliches associated with it. And yet he has to ski back down in a breathtaking high-wire sequence.
The film’s counterbalancing deep exploration of grief, and the carefully studied emotional ethnography of its subjects, including charming Nepali Sherpa Yukta, keeps “Everest: The Other Side” from ever turning into the kind of spectacle-driven natego you see on streaming television. not this soothing Seeing the nature-doctor, but instead, taking a pointed look in the face of death – also with a hint of marital anger. Chin and Vasarhelyi’s greatest achievement is maintaining suspense even when the climax is already predicted – and in the vividly personal, home-hitting terms through which they tell another person’s story.
Grade: B+
“Everest: The Other Side” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. National Geographic will release the film in theaters from October 30.