TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! While Mount Everest has been summited more than 13,000 times, only 5 people have done it from the north face, which is astoundingly steep and avalanche-prone. Everest: The Other Side is an IMAX documentary following Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, a couple with a dream of climbing up and skiing down Everest from the north face.
The couple Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin won the 2019 Best Documentary Oscar for producing and directing the tense and gripping Free Solo. It followed Alex Honnold in his death wish / dream to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan alone, with no ropes or safety gear. It was a film that one-upped the most tense drama and action that Hollywood has ever produced— the stakes were real life and death, and the result was a compelling portrait of a singular individual who, let’s just say, isn’t like the rest of us.
Now Vasarhelyi and Chin are back. If one movie could say to another, “Hold my beer…,” and the starting point is Free Solo, you are starting to get the astounding insanity of Everest: The Other Side. This is a preposterous film that shouldn’t exist. Did I gobble it up with my eyeballs? Of course! Do I also feel bad about it? Also yes! It is cinematic glory at an incomprehensible level. You are constantly asking yourself, “What, what, what!?! How!?! No, seriously?!? How does this exist?” But also, “Should I be watching this? This might be wrong.”
Ski mountaineer Jim Morrison, in a yellow jacket and cap, looks into the camera in Everest: The Other Side.
“…following Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, a couple with a dream of climbing up and skiing down Everest from the north face.”
The film starts as a love story of sorts — Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson are a couple, but they’re also some of the best ski mountaineers in the world. That means they like to climb mountains and ski down them, including some of the highest peaks in the world. That’s crazy enough, but then they get the dream of scaling and skiing Everest from the north face and filming it. That should just be a silly conversation at a bar, which everyone laughs about at the time, and are ashamed of when they sober up. But somehow, this is a real-life thing that serious adults not only entertained, but funded to the tune of an IMAX movie 8 years in the making.
As this story begins, in 2018, there are two couples — the subjects and the filmmakers. This is a mild and ambiguous spoiler, but one that I think will greatly increase the intrigue, and not at all diminish your enjoyment of the film — neither relationship survives. Whether it is because of death or the unbelievable risks this dream/nightmare put on the relationships, I will not say. But the answers are in this enormity of a film.
"…only the potatoes are broken human bones in a bag of skin…"
