Mark Reviews Movies: SUMMIT FEVER

Summit Fever, Saban Films/Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 13, 2022

Filmmakers love to romanticize the mystery of mountain climbing, but that's not the case with Julian Gilbey's Summit Fever. Indeed, the more fascinating parts of this movie suggest how the romanticizing of something so inherently dangerous has numbed people to the risk.

Climbers here receive sponsorships for their endeavors, and knowing that people are watching and that real money is on the line, those climbers feel obligated to make a show of it. That escalates the potential peril of injury or death, but should the latter come, at least everyone in the local bar will toast and cheer the climber's memory and daring.

Gilbey's movie is at its most effective when it's openly skeptical of the very thrills and spectacle it's putting on display. It might flaunt a bit too much for its own good, though.

The characters here are all climbers of various levels of experience. Michael (Freddie Thorp) has been a climbing partner for his friend JP (Michel Biel) for some time, and the friend is just on the cusp of making it professional with some sponsors lined up and waiting for his breakthrough climb. Michael leaves a job at his father's insurance firm in London to join JP in the Alps, hoping to make his own dreams come true.

Most of the story, then, is about climbing, as JP and a couple of his other friends, Leo (Ryan Phillippe) and his wife Natascha (Hannah New), push Michael out of his comfort zone. That's what it takes to make it in this business, which has become exactly that, as one superstar climber realizes as he scales a sheer mountain with fans watching, drinking, dancing to music, and barely noticing when he decides to make a bold but wholly unnecessary leap.

The climbing sequences here are effective, although Gilbey adds a few too many complications of nature and personality clashes as the story progresses. One wrong move, as that scene with the star climber makes clear, is all that it takes for disaster, not all of this other stuff.

Some other extraneous material includes a romance between Michael and skier Isabelle (Matheilde Warnier), who serves as the worrying conscience the character already possesses, as well as a tragic back story for Michael that doesn't quite fit into movie's main concern. When it's focused on the climbing and particularly the cynical nature of ignoring the human cost in favor of a heroically romantic idea, Gilbey's movie is both refreshing and occasionally pointed in its observations.

The problem, perhaps, is that, in showcasing the spectacle—no matter how frightening and bloody it might be—over the characters, Summit Fever short-changes its critique of what climbing has and continues to become. In other words, the highs of the adventure of the climb make a bigger impact than the sobering and often fatal descent.

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