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Everest: The Other Side Opens in Theaters
Confirmed
In Short: Jim Morrison, a mountaineer and backcountry skier, is one of the people who has gotten the chance to experience Everest.
At its best, 'Everest: The Other Side' attempts to understand with as much empathy as possible what could push someone to the extremes that Morrison goes to – what could make someone feel as though the only way to make sense of the world is to risk life and limb.
The film documents Morrison and his partner, Hilaree Nelson, attempting to climb and ski down the north side of Mount Everest – something that had never been done before.
Every shot of Everest in the film is as majestic as expected.
The film shifts from a story about achieving the impossible to one about grief after a tragedy early on.
Nelson, skiing with her husband down the Manasalu summit in Nepal, was struck by an avalanche that caused her to fall approximately 5,900 feet.
Morrison, grappling with the loss of his life partner, asks the question that often arises after someone dies in the mountains: 'Why did we do this?'
Background
Everest: The Other Side is a 2026 documentary film directed and produced by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. A co-production of the United States, China, and Nepal, it follows Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson as they fall in love and share a dream of climbing and skiing down the North Face of Mount Everest.
What's confirmed
- Jim Morrison, a mountaineer and backcountry skier, is one of the people who has gotten the chance to experience Everest.
- It’s a little impossible to talk in depth about “Everest: The Other Side” without talking about its inciting incident, which is also its most shocking.
- Valued voices share insights about Atlanta and beyond This review contains spoilers for “Everest: The Other Side” One of the very first things you see in “Everest: The Other Side,” is a shot of the titular mountain.
- At its best, “Everest: The Other Side” attempts to understand with as much empathy as possible what could push someone to the extremes that Morrison goes to – what could make someone feel as though the only way to make sense of the world is to risk life and limb.
What's still developing
- Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2026 Venice Film Festival.
- NatGeo opens the film in theaters starting October 30.
- And in Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s film, every shot of Everest is as majestic as you might expect.
- Whatever dramas had been unfolding between Vasarhelyi and Chin at the time (their break-up had been occurring during production) are kept offscreen, but they still gnaw at the edges of what is a climbing-doc spectacle at 29,000 feet, but a considered relationship story down at sea level. (2015’s “ Meru,” in which Chin scaled a Himalayan mountain amid much tension-supplying disaster, gave us a taste of the wear and tear these ascents put on their relationship.) Nelson’s first and only marriage cratered beneath her own career-long death drive, a relationship where a thousand tiny hairpin cracks in the ice eventually split them in half.
- While history will tell you that Morrison safely hit his apogee and survived the project, the audience nonetheless remains in terrified, clammy doubt as Morrison endures unforgiving avalanches, a 9,000-vertical-foot corridor of bulletproof ice, and a shitstorm of personal tragedies in the run-up.
- “It was not really a scream,” he said in an interview this fall.
- Pemba Sherpa (Sharwa) was on the ridge filming them for the upcoming documentary, Everest: The Other Side.
- The fixed ropes were gone, pickets were broken in half, and he was doing what he called “the most impossible skiing you could ever do,” on bare ice and in bad visibility.
- For Nelson, who’d spent her life making bold first descents around the world, high-altitude summits were where she made a living, but they also offered something else: a space where the boundaries between the physical and spiritual world blurred, where “you can almost reach through to the other side,” she says in the film.
- “I’m praying for the children,” Morrison said, referring to Nelson’s two teenage boys, Grayden and Quinn.
- Quick reactions on our instagram (@ thesunbreak ) and bluesky (and also mine ), with longer reviews to follow.
- Years in the making, the account of ski-mountaineering couple Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison’s quest to summit and ski down the rarely conquered face of Mount Everest is utterly devastating, especially as presented here at TIFF in all its stunning IMAX glory.