On demand: "Meru"

2015's Meru was an early entry in the recent run of don't-look-down docs: non-fictions that have centred can-do American males with admirable upper-body strength pitting themselves against Mother Nature in the hope of achieving immortality, while risking coming a deathly cropper in the process. (The most prominent of these was 2018's Oscar-winning Free Solo; The Alpinist opened in the UK last autumn.) Conrad Anker, Renan Ozturk and climber/photographer/co-director Jimmy Chin have their eyes locked on one of the toughest challenges in big-wall climbing (an especially vertical form of mountaineering): Mount Meru in the Himalayas, a towering slab of granite that rises 20,000 feet above sea level and has thus far defied previous climbers, in part because, as one expert puts it, "it's tough in a challenging way". Even experienced scrabblers require a week just to scale the top 1500ft, which means that anyone troubling to make the effort has to do so beneath the weight of backpacks containing tent, food and other vital supplies. This might make me sound less ambitious than usual, but it really isn't my scene; watching these guys attempt to sleep in a cradle dangling off a fuck-off slope as a storm blows in, I suspect even high-flying corporate alphas might lean towards an astonished but firm headshake and a bottom line of "rather them than me". The film never asks what the mountaineers do if they need the toilet up there in the middle of the night; the mind boggles, nevertheless.

A century on from Leni Riefenstahl, the mountaineering film seems to have settled on a particular structure, doling out the climbers' backstories on the lower slopes, and then - having emptied its own rucksack - raising the tension of whether or not its chosen dots on the landscape will make it all the way to the top. (The scenery brings itself: Mount Meru looks spectacular on a sunny day, and just about the worst place in the world to be after dark.) I think we're still waiting for a climbing film that doesn't just take its almost sociopathically laidback subjects at face value - one that actively and aggressively interrogates them, to figure out why they're so compelled to take on challenges that aren't just highly risky but actually sorta pointless in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Meru cuts to the closing credits rather than addressing what these men were planning to do once they'd reached the summit: it's not as though this freezing crag constitutes a nice spot for a picnic, and surely they then have to expend an equal amount of physical and psychic energy coming back down to earth again. Free Solo - as here, credited to Chin with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi - took a step in this direction, surrounding the upwardly mobile Alex Honnold with family and friends (including the filmmakers) who could raise such questions, no matter that the single-minded Honnold proceeded to shrug almost all of them off. I wonder if this comes with the territory: in order to perform these high-wire acts on a twice- or thrice-yearly basis, you have to leave any doubts and queries back at basecamp.

Meru is a more conventional portrait in its three-act, rise-fall-rise dramatic structure, and there are points where you can feel it giving into these real-life spidermen's protective control freakery, their heightened ability to shut out the humdrum, ground-level stuff going on thousands of feet beneath them. (One question these films haven't yet satisfactorily addressed: where do these kids get the money from to go around the world doing this?) But the underlying psychology is fascinating, especially if you've absolutely no intention of going in this direction yourself. With their relentless urge to self-document, the Chin set are made for the movies: they can hand any interested filmmaker hours and hours of jawdropping, ready-made footage. Yet the more I look at this footage - and there's been plenty of it out there on our screens these past few years - the more it strikes me that the cold, hard, indifferent terrain these men set out into corresponds to something within the climbers themselves. (The most illustrious talking head here is the author Jon Krakauer, who wrote Into the Wild, and thus knows something about atypically wired young men electing to vanish in nature.) We spend most of Meru peering over edges of one kind or another; a pastime that might have seemed a pinnacle of human achievement back in the days of empire now starts to look unnervingly like an actualisation of the death drive. If these men feel they have to conquer it - and that's if they feel anything; they sometimes appear as numb as their own frostbitten toes - it's probably for the best if they get as far away as possible from everybody, literally venture to the ends of the Earth, while they do.

Meru is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.