In ‘Everest: The Other Side,’ dreams, exhilaration and risk combine in terrifying Imax

Documentary filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin specialize in capturing what no one else has done before, and when it comes to climbing docs, they’ve been at the summit since “Meru” and the Oscar-winning “Free Solo.” Now, with “Everest: The Other Side,” they’ve made their most visceral, vertigo-inducing experience yet — in Imax, no less — while also tackling the aspects of this extreme discipline that leave a lot of us unable to fathom its appeal.

“Everest: The Other Side” is, in some sense, two films, an unfinished one and a revived one, built on how a love story between ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson inspired an epic quest over many years: to not only scale the rarely summited Chinese side of Everest but to then ski down it.

Over 15,000 people have made their way up Everest’s Nepalese side to the top. One quick snapshot in the film, showing a cramped single file of mountaineers, laughably suggests it’s everybody’s reachable bucket-list item. But only a handful of souls have ever gone up the treacherous, unforgiving north face — 9,000 steep miles of snow, rock and ice with a gnarly gully given the forbidding name the Hornbein Couloir. Going down is even harder.

If the most famous answer to why climb Everest was George Mallory’s “Because it’s there,” you may believe the only response to why ski down it is: “Because it’s insane.” And yet, after listening to Nelson tell the filmmakers what it meant for her to find a kindred spirit of resilience and adventure in Morrison — a bighearted guy who’d been through devastating loss in his life — the notion of these two mastering peaks together feels like they’d accomplished their happiest feat already. Nelson herself came to the relationship with two boys from a previous marriage and it’s when she’s talking about her teenage sons that you sense a slight defensiveness. She doesn’t want to have to explain to anyone why she can’t get joy from both being a mom and pursuing a calling that shoulders enormous risk.

The co-directors, close to this community, address their concerns on camera about responsibly filming such perilous endeavors, with Vasarhelyi asking her husband how many guests to their house have since died. It’s a discussion that comes about because, at a key moment, Chin agrees to add personal risk to his directing duties by becoming a climbing partner on the Everest team.

Soon, tales of loss, memory and hopeful closure become central to the buildup, along with worried feelings of climbers’ loved ones. We’re also privy to a camp meeting after a noteworthy near-disaster, in which fears and safety are openly addressed by the Sherpas (and not necessarily favorably regarding their well-funded, foreign employers). But generally, we sense a deeply bonded, well-trained team looking out for each other, considering every possibility and setting themselves up for a truly mind-boggling pinnacle.

Naturally, “The Everest: The Other Side” saves its dazzling point-of-view spectacle for last, which, in Imax, is both terrifying to behold and exhilarating to experience as a blow-by-blow manifestation of a dream. You may still feel unsettled about the drive to chase it with so much at stake. But at least, in this instance, it comes fueled by feelings more acutely personal than mere individual glory. Life can often feel like your own private mountain to conquer.

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