'Meru' Movie Review

Why Meru should be on your list

Most climbing documentaries follow the same arc. Big mountain, brave humans, swelling score, summit, credits. Meru does not work that way. It opens cold with three guys jammed into a hanging cot bolted to a wall of granite, looking like the weather has already half-killed them, and then jumps three years back to ask how they got there. By the time you catch up to the present, you stop caring about the summit. You start caring about whether they make it home.

The film is about the Shark's Fin on Mount Meru, a 21,000-foot peak in the Garhwal Himalayas that has defeated more elite climbing teams over the past three decades than anything else in the region. Jon Krakauer shows up as the film's outside voice and lays out the problem cleanly. You can be a great ice climber and a great rock climber and a great altitude climber, and Meru still does not care. The Shark's Fin is its own monster.

What you are actually watching when you are watching the wall

Co-directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi — the same team that later took home an Oscar for Free Solo — Meru is the rare doc where the people you're watching also shot most of the footage. Chin and Renan Ozturk hauled a Canon 5D Mark II and a Panasonic camcorder up the route during the 2011 ascent, which means every shot at altitude is someone bolted to a rock face making the bizarre choice to film instead of just survive.

The cinematography won at Cinema Eye Honors that year, and once you start watching closely you understand why. The pulled-back wide shots of the portaledge — that hanging tent the size of a bunk bed, swinging in negative-twenty cold — do not make geometric sense. Where is the camera. Who is hanging it. The answer, usually, is that one of the climbers is filming the other doing the climbing they would normally be doing themselves, and that quiet logistical insanity is the whole story of how this movie got made.

The middle stretch is the gut punch

Here is where Meru breaks ranks with every other adventure doc. Between the failed 2008 attempt and the 2011 return, the entire premise of going back falls apart. Ozturk has a near-fatal skiing accident on a separate filming trip. Traumatic brain injury, fractured vertebrae, one of his vertebral arteries closed off so badly that doctors flag a real stroke risk if he ever goes back to altitude.

Four days after Ozturk's accident, Chin returns to the same range to finish the same shoot and gets caught in a catastrophic avalanche. He walks away. Without a scratch.

And then they go back to Meru. Together. Five months later.

The film does not flinch from how strange this is, and it does not pretend the decision was reasonable.

The third climber is the soul of the thing

Conrad Anker is the elder of the three, and he is the reason the film has weight. His mentor Terry "Mugs" Stump dreamed of the Shark's Fin and died before getting to attempt it. His climbing partner Alex Lowe was killed in an avalanche on Shishapangma in 1999, and Anker later married Lowe's widow, Jenni, and helped raise her sons. He is a guarded interviewee in a way that reads as protective, not evasive. Watch him talk about Meru and you can see him doing math the rest of us don't have to, weighing the climb against the friends he has already lost.

Ozturk is the opposite kind of presence. There's footage of him during recovery, trying to move on a small wall back in the States, and it is one of the most honest things any climbing film has shown you in the last ten years. He is not performing toughness. He is checking whether his body still works.

Chin is the trickiest figure, because he is also the co-director. He keeps himself slightly at arm's length on screen. The film does not press him as hard as it presses the other two, and that's the one structural choice you can quibble with.

Jenni Lowe-Anker is also in the film. The reaction shots are in the film.

Trivia worth knowing going in

The husband-and-wife team behind Meru met during the making of this movie. They later married, had a daughter, and made Free Solo, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. So if you've already seen Alex Honnold solo El Capitan and want to know where Chin and Vasarhelyi sharpened their teeth, this is the answer.

Bob Eisenhardt, who edited Meru, is a three-time Emmy winner and an Oscar nominee with more than sixty docs to his name. The score is by J. Ralph, who has worked on a long list of Oscar-nominated documentaries, including Man on Wire, The Cove and Chasing Ice.

Meru took the U.S. Audience Documentary Award at Sundance 2015 and was later shortlisted for Best Documentary at the 88th Academy Awards.

Where it slightly stumbles

The score occasionally tells you what to feel, especially in the first act. There are a couple too many reverent shots of summit crosses and starlit base camps. Ozturk's recovery, given how foregrounded his neurological injury is, gets compressed in the back third in a way that feels like an editing constraint rather than a choice.

These are notes, not complaints. The film earns the runtime.

Things to look out for

Watch where the camera is during the portaledge scenes. Watch Anker's face when he talks about Mugs Stump. Watch Ozturk in the high-altitude footage near the end, because his body is reading itself in real time, and you can see it on him.

Watch it on the biggest screen you can find.