SXSW FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is already the sort of challenge that most people file away in the mental drawer labelled “absolutely not.” Thousands attempt it each year, and plenty fail; some don’t return. In The Ascent, Mandy Horvath decides to try it without legs.
If that last sentence isn’t enough to spark your interest, you should also know that the climb is only part of the story. The mountain is real, the struggle is immense, but what sits behind the challenge is messier and far more unsettling.
Horvath lost both of her legs in 2014 after being found unconscious on train tracks in a small Nebraska town. Police ruled it an accident, but the scattered memories of what happened suggest otherwise. The documentary lets that uncertainty hover over everything that follows.
The Ascent could easily lean into the mystery alone. There is enough material there for a grim true crime digression. But directors Francis Cronin, Edward Drake, and Scott Veltri keep pulling us back to the present. The climb becomes the film’s spine with everything else rightfully in its orbit.
The expedition is grueling to watch as Mandy moves slowly, painfully hauling herself over terrain that defeats plenty of able-bodied climbers every year. She crawls across the volcanic dust and stretches of ice that would intimidate any climber, occasionally stopping to fire off jokes so dark they land somewhere between gallows humour and obstinate defiance. That tone becomes integral, as without it the film might have slipped into the sort of inspirational documentary that patronisingly applauds its subject from a distance. And Horvath would clearly hate that.
“The mountain is real, the struggle is immense, but what sits behind the challenge is messier and far more unsettling.”
Instead, we see things from a perspective that allows her to remain complicated. She talks openly about the years after the accident: the drinking, the arrest, the sense that she had reached the absolute bottom. The documentary doesn’t try to tidy any of that away – if anything, it leans into the contradictions. Horvath is stubborn, funny, angry, and occasionally guarded. She is also quite plainly relentless.
The Ascent keeps drifting between its layers. The mountain, the past, the uneasy relationship with family, and the slow rebuilding of trust with strangers guided her up the slope. Sometimes the structure feels slightly engineered, with emotional beats arriving with careful timing. But Horvath herself keeps disrupting that neatness.
The unfiltered footage of the adventure gives a candid, personal view of the adversity and emotional gravity with the most dramatic, unforgiving backdrop imaginable. And the end result isn’t a sports documentary, it’s something messier and more interesting. A portrait of someone rebuilding their relationship with the world after absolute trust has been shattered.
By the time Mandy reaches the summit, her achievement is undeniable, yet the film doesn’t frame it as a neat ending. The questions that haunted her in the beginning remain unresolved. The past doesn’t suddenly dissolve into thin mountain air.
Audiences willing to accept the film on those terms will find it to be one of the most affecting documentaries to emerge from this year’s festival circuit.
The Ascent screened at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival.
"…The past doesn’t suddenly dissolve into thin mountain air."
