‘The Last First: Winter K2’ Review: A Mountain-Climbing Documentary With More Tragedy Than Vertigo

In the past decade, the mountain-climbing documentary has become a genre unto itself. Spectacular movies like “Free Solo,” “The Dawn Wall,” and the 2024 Sundance knockout “Skywalkers: A Love Story” (about rooftoppers who scale the world’s tallest spindly skyscrapers, a feat so dangerous that they could be climbing earthly peaks) are like the world’s dizziest action films. They exert an appeal that might be summed up by the line: Come for the heart-in-the-throat vertigo, stay for the human drama…but also stay to explore the question, “What sort of a person pursues this much vertigo?” These movies have a don’t-look-down appeal that’s at once awesome and terrifying.

So naturally, I expected more of the same from “The Last First: Winter K2,” the mountain-climbing documentary that opened the Sundance Film Festival today. It’s about an expedition — or, really, several expeditions at once — to climb K2, the second-highest peak in the world (after Mount Everest). Just hearing how dangerous and forbidding K2 is can give you a chill (and the cold is part of it — even at base camp, the temperatures can reach 50 below). It’s known as the Savage Mountain, because George Bell, a climber in 1953, said, “It’s a savage mountain that tries to kill you.” More people have died trying to climb K2 (nearly 100 in total) than any other mountain. At 8,611 meters, it’s 238 meters shorter than Everest, but it presents a far more treacherous and difficult climb. Even the mountain’s location is forbidding. As described by Wikipedia, K2 “lies in the Karakoram range, partially in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and partially in the China-administered Trans-Karakoram Trace in the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County or Xinjiang.”

Don’t climb this at home.

K2 has been scaled many times (the first ascent to the summit was by an Italian expedition in 1954), but “The Last First,” set in 2020 and 2021, chronicles the first successful attempt to ascend to the top of K2 in winter. There are 14 mountains on earth higher than 6,000 meters, and as the film opens 13 of them have been climbed in winter. But the staggering difficulty of K2 in winter, with its icy vertical facades and frigid snowstorms and winds that can send large rocks hurtling, almost makes it a different mountain than it is at any other time. The title of “The Last First” means: This was the last true mountaineering challenge that existed on earth. That’s why so many wanted to try it — because it was there.

The director, Amir Bar-Lev (“Long Strange Trip,” “The Tillman Story”), fastens onto a charismatic climber from Iceland, John Snorri Sigurjónsson, who is genial and strapping, with a loving spouse and six kids. His wife, Lina, talks about how he’s addicted to doing this, and when he arrives at the base of K2, where he has arranged to make the climb with a fabled Pakistani mountaineer, Ali Sadpara, and his son, Sajid Sadpara, we’re primed for another jaw-dropping mountain doc — a close-up look at humanity vs. the elements.

But something has changed. There is now, in the world, a profusion of climbers (we see footage of an endless stretching line of them hiking up Everest), and that becomes part of the story that “The Last First” is telling: the democratization of mountain climbing, which has its commercial side (one of the groups making the K2 climb has signed up with an outfit called Seven Summit Treks) and most definitely its social-media side (many of the climbers have come with their own camera person). Before long, the situation on K2 becomes quite competitive, especially when Nirmal “Nims” Purja shows up. He’s a mountaineer from Nepal who’s the closest thing this sport has to a Himalayan superstar. In 2019, Purja climbed all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks in six months (at the time, a record). He arrives with a team of Sherpas, and his ambition to be the first climber to conquer K2 in winter is presented as proudly nationalistic. He’s doing it for the glory of Nepal.

That seems as good a reason as any to scale an epic peak. Bar-Lev interviews Nims, who we can see is an obsessive rock star of mountaineering; it’s clear that he’ll be one of the film’s key competing players. The teams are all wary of one another, because each wants to be first, and the film mostly stays tethered to John Snorri’s point-of-view. But then we learn that Nims and his team, in the middle of the night, have actually made the trek to the summit. They have conquered K2 in winter. The feat that the movie is built around is accomplished before we know it.

That doesn’t stop the other teams from also trying to reach the top. And the fact that the movie it about a lot more than simply being first isn’t, in itself, a problem. Yet there’s something odd, and frankly a little patronizing, about how “The Last First” takes the triumph of the Nepalese team and just sort of throws it away, treating is almost as an afterthought. There are rumors that something scurrilous went on — that Nims cut the ropes he’d used, so that no one could follow him. But those rumors turn out to be false. The Nepalese climbers did nothing wrong; they proved themselves to be extraordinary. So why is “The Last First” so uninterested in them?

There was no camera around to record Nims and his team as they were ascending. And, in fact, one of the distinguishing features of “The Last First” is that for all the breathtaking footage shot on K2 (the craggy rock faces, the avalanches, the clouds, the lunar grandeur of it all), the film isn’t photographed to give us the kind of vicarious you-are-there climbing rush that “Free Solo,” “The Dawn Wall,” and “Skywalkers” did. As a result, I suspect it will prove a far less commercial movie.

Instead of turning his film into a hovering-on-the-slopes thrill ride, Bar-Lev focuses on how the K2 winter climb becomes a chain of mishaps and disasters. One of the most experienced of all the climbers, a Spaniard named Sergi Mingote, falls to his death. This is a wake-up call, or should have been. But rather than heeding the danger, the climbers who remain begin instead to get in each other’s way. The mountain is scaled in sections, one camp at a time, and at one of the camps there aren’t enough tents for sleeping. The climbers have to crowd into the tents that are there, which means that no one gets a proper rest, and that results, down the line, in more tragedy.

“The Last First” is not another climb-every-mountain doc of daredevil glory. Here the glory is threaded with human folly. During the 2020-2021 attempt to climb K2, a total of five climbers died. “The Last First” is a revealing look at how they risked their lives for an ideal, maybe for an addiction. It’s a movie that shows us the dark side of literally getting high. That’s engrossing, to a point, but it’s not exhilarating.