“Those who think heights are better left to the birds might find themselves looking for an early exit in Mountain, a ravishing feat of vertiginous filmmaking set to a score of old and new classical compositions recorded by Richard Tognetti (Master and Commander) and his Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Examining our historical obsession with the titular peaks, director Jennifer Peedom’s Mountain is one of the most visceral essay films ever made, with Peedom and her cinematographer Renan Ozturk hopping across continents from Tibet to Australia to Alaska, unfurling a series of glistening images that should be seen only on the biggest of big screens.
Mountain‘s discursions offer moments of great beauty, whether venturing inside a Sherpa monastery or recording a mountain expanding and contracting, as though breathing, via the magic of time-lapse photography. Gliding shots of snow-capped mountains ringed by clouds and the daredevils who climb them are overlaid with excerpts from Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains Of The Mind, voiced with suitable cragginess by Willem Dafoe.” (Harry Windsor, The Hollywood Reporter)
“A visual and musical spectacle that showcases the majesty of nature and man’s helplessness to it.” (Gayle MacDonald, Globe and Mail)
“Inexpressibly beautiful, breathtaking yet terrifying images from snow-capped peaks and vertical cliff faces dominate Jennifer Peedom’s latest documentary Mountain, which explores the magnetic pull exercised by these perilously dangerous summits.” (Matthew Anderson, CineVue)
“Mountain is remarkable filmmaking (…) its visuals and audible assets command you to see the film in the biggest auditorium possible.” (Paul Heath, The Hollywood News)