This one was a pick by my wife. Though we no longer climb regularly, I guess the subject is still fascinating. This one is a small documentary, so small in fact that it seems to have been basically made by the three climbers themselves, about their attempt to climb up Meru Peak along the so-called Shark’s Fin route, said to be one of the hardest mountaineering routes in the world.

The three climbers are Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk, with Anker being the oldest and most experienced and therefore the de facto leader of the group. For anyone interested in watching this film, it probably won’t be a spoiler to say that this actually documents two separate attempts by the group. The first one in 2008 failed as they had to wait out a snowstorm for several days and ran low on food. The second attempt in 2011 succeeded but in the intervening years, both Chin and Ozturk suffered horrific accidents so it’s a wonder that they made that attempt at all. The documentary also enlists Jon Krakauer, the famed author of Into Thin Air, to provide commentary and context for the expedition. This was probably necessary as none of the three climbers are particularly eloquent.

Before watching this, I was hoping that the documentary would be packed with the technical details and logistics of the two expeditions. The wonk in me would just love to know stuff like the equipment they packed, the rations they had planned out and even the training regimen that they use to prepare themselves. Unfortunately the film turned out to be pretty light on this. Instead it focuses much about the psychology of the people who are driven to do such dangerous things and the mental discipline that they need to push themselves over and over again past any reasonable limits. It’s not that this is an uninteresting angle but it’s kind of hard to have this as the sole narrative that drives the whole film. I did like how Meru incidentally delves into the community of climbers and the links between them. It looks like there are something like lineages with the eldest and most respected ones being mentors to younger ones so that it matters in the climbing world who you were taught by and who you have climbed with.

It’s only to be expected that something like this would be full of scenery porn and Meru doesn’t disappoint. I found however that I valued more highly the poorly lit, badly framed casual shots of the climbers interacting in all sorts of mundane ways, cinéma vérité style. Whether they’re joking over having couscous for every meal every day or jury-rigging a broken joint on their Portaledge tent, these intimate shots capture the sheer torture of the climb better than anything they can put into words. The documentary also includes shots of the two accidents that befell Ozturk and Chin. They’re every bit as scary and as gory as you can imagine, though in the age of YouTube everyone will have seen the like before. This documentary managed to convince me that these people are seriously crazy given the immense risks and sacrifices that they accept. Ozturk’s wife even says that he bought a plane ticket to go for the second expedition without telling her about it.

In the end, I found Meru to be a decent but not particularly noteworthy documentary. It dwells too heavily into the personal situations and feelings of the climbers to be very interesting for a wider audience and seems targeted mostly at the climbing community. The fact that they don’t spend time explaining how the Portaledge works or the other technical aspects of the climb reinforce that impression. Still, if you want to see what a major big wall climb looks like, this is a good place to start.