There are some truly amazing images in this spectacular feature documentary about mountains from Australian film-maker Jennifer Peedom. Her camera miraculously soars and swoops as the film shows extraordinary planes and peaks. I sometimes wished that, like David Attenborough with his nature documentaries, she could put a 10-minute making-of segment at the end, showing how she got these staggering shots. A helicopter? A drone? They are so incredible that you are willing to overlook some slightly unimaginative choices for musical accompaniment. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was a bit off-the-peg.
Willem Dafoe is the narrator, reading a text co-written by Peedom and the British writer Robert Macfarlane. The film traces the early days of mountaineering, a new passion marked by humanity’s quest for the sublime, succeeded by the new craze for extreme high-altitude sports, in which the note of humility has been lost, replaced by a new machismo and a dash of near-deathwish egotism. As the narrator shrewdly says, they are “half in love with themselves and half in love with oblivion”. The pictures are remarkable. It’s something to seek out on the big screen.
