‘Beyond The Summit’: Malaga Review

Dir: Ibon Cormenzana. Spain/France. 2021. 95 mins.

A dramatic two-hander set, but not shot, in the high altitudes of the Himalayas, starting with its very title, Ibon Cormenzana’s Beyond the Summit aims high: but unfortunately, like its hero, a couple of times, it falls flat. This tale of the personal quest of an inexperienced young climber and the woman who rescues him is, like so many mountain movies, a metaphor about overcoming ourselves – but so interested is it in that positive overarching message that it leaves behind some crucial equipment, principally characterization and credibility, back at base camp.

The film never strays from the path into anything resembling complex psychology

The result is that the director/producer Ibon Cormenzana’s fourth feature since his wonderful 2001 debut Jaizkabel is a movie that is unable to climb much higher than its noble intentions – among which can be counted its status as one of the few non-documentary mountaineering films to feature a female climber at its heart.

Mateo (Javier Rey) leaves his home in the Basque country with the aim of climbing Annapurna, which is not only one of the highest, but one of the most dangerous mountains in the world by mortality rate. No sooner has he set off than Mateo has tumbled, in a scene of Pythonesque absurdity, into a crevasse. As shown on screen, this would probably have killed him instantly, but miraculously free of even a broken bone the lucky lad is pulled out and rapidly nursed back to health by successful climber Ione (Patricia López Arnaíz), who doesn’t look too thrilled at how things are going.

Ione has been living in a cabin, built in the Spanish style on the lower slopes of Annapurna, for months: depressed, solitary and worried about adapting back to the mundane world. It is a fascinating mental state, apparently inspired by the experiences of Spanish climber Edurne Pasaban, the first woman to summit all fourteen of the world’s 8,000m mountains. Meanwhile, Mateo’s reasons for wishing to climb Annapurna are, he explains, guilt after the death of his former girlfriend; though Ione angrily discourages him from continuing with what is effectively a suicide mission, she realizes there is little she can do to stop him. (Beyond the Summit should probably come with a hazard warning for wannabe Alpinists.)

There is a lot of interesting psychology implicit in Beyond the Summit: the climber Pasaban, for example, believes that there is a basic incompatibility between the dangers of scaling summits and the responsibilities of motherhood. So it is interesting that Ione falls, as they drunkenly sing pop songs to one another in the snow, into the role of mother to the reckless, immature Mateo, who may be a great and faithful boyfriend, but is apparently an irresponsible idiot in his attitude to the mountain.

But the film never strays from the path into anything resembling complex psychology: at the press conference for the film in Málaga, López Arnaiz was wonderfully entertaining about preparing the mindset of her character, but very little of it makes it onto the screen. What you get is a rather shaky drama featuring all the standard motifs of the high-mountain movie, decently handled – threatening weather conditions, climbing windows, worried phone conversations that crackle, fragile tents flapping in the gale, and some spectacular views, with images of Annapurna digitally spliced into shots of the Pyrenees in northern Spain, where it was made under arduous conditions.

Both actors, particularly López de Arnaíz, do give it their best shot – and perhaps what is indeed the film’s best shot, strangely for a mountain film, comes right at the end in a lengthy close-up of Ione’s face. She works hard to communicate through her expression all of the experiences that have brought her here, but very little of it gets through to the viewer because, as with Mateo, the script has forgotten to give her an inner life. It is this lack of character work that makes one dramatically unjustified and annoyingly manipulative lengthy final sequence of Beyond the Summit almost unbearable, but for all the wrong reasons.