Human beings simply aren’t built to function at the cruising altitude of a 747. At 29,000 feet, you body is literally dying. Lack of oxygen becomes a toxic, poisoning the brain and forcing your body to shut down non-vital organs. At such heights, it’s near impossible to breathe without a tank of O. Beholding Everest on a proper IMAX screen, I too found myself gasping for air. It’s literally breathtaking.

Baltasar Kormákur’s docudrama about the 1996 Everest disaster is the perfect storm of impeccable spectacle storytelling and mile-high emotional stakes. Extraordinary panoramas of snow-crusted mountain spines line Kormákur’s shots to each absorbing border while a cast of thoroughly engaging characters scramble up their assorted nigh-impossible faces, battling for their spiritual rejuvenation, personal nirvana and eventually their lives. Jason Clarke is Rob Hall, a wizard of mountaineering and headmaster to Adventure Consultants. Amongst his claims to fame, Hall had summited Everest five times, more than any other non-Sherpa climber. Though his clientele is happy to dish out a steep 65K to top the 29K peak, Hall considers it his primary duty to get them down the mountain safely. The summit is secondary.

At one point, author Jon Krakauer, played expertly by Michael Kelly, begs the question to the rag-tag group of would-be climbers: Why? Why do this to yourselves? Why endure the pain and the cold and the suffering? The assorted mountaineers look one another over, before snidely regurgitating George Mallory’s famed retort “Because it’s there” in chorus. A worse movie would have left it there. Rather, Everest takes time to build in the stakes for each and every climber, giving us the rhyme and reason as to why they would be willing to risk everything to summit the highest mountain on Earth.

Yasuo Namba (Naoko Mori) has claimed 6 of the world’s tallest 7 peaks. She needs that last notch in her belt. Beck (Josh Brolin) is there to escape a black cloud of depression that only dissipates when he’s on the mountain; any mountain. Mailman/carpenter Doug Hansen (John Hawkes) wants to prove to his kids that an ordinary man can achieve the impossible through willpower and persistence. It’s his third attempt at summiting.

Though we’re allocated limited time with each component of the climbing party, each and every character feels alive. They’re flawed individuals – unhappy in their marriages, putting themselves in immediate peril, chasing enlightenment at dizzying altitudes. In most disaster epics, the loss of life is often taken with a grain of salt. Death is an expectation. As a storytelling device, it’s utilized to advance the plight of the protagonist or to communicate the stakes at play. In Everest, even before the big storm mounts, the looming sense of dread, mixed in with an icing of accomplishment and personal triumph, is already vertiginous. You want them to summit. You pray they survive. You really don’t want to see their demise.

As improbable gales gather and the squall mounts, the dread becomes all encompassing. Party members die off in the tempest’s reckless onslaught. The jeopardy is so palpable, the dread so real that I get a sick feeling in my stomach.

Adroit, stunning cinematography from Salvatore Totino delivers said abdomen sinking as he zips over the climbers in scrumptious wide-frame shots or photographs their visage from below. The cinematography is so photorealistic, so impeccably true to life, you find yourself forgetting that these actors were not filmed on Earth’s highest peak. Cruel instances of frostbite and hundred-mile-a-hour winds deliver FX punches as the mental degradation of altitude poisoning results in symptoms such as tearing off all of one’s clothes in one particularly harrowing sequence.

The consummate hurricane of perfect visual effects and heady intellectual disintegration makes for arresting cinema. Your eyelids will be frozen to the screen, your body shaking violently from the meaty cacophony of Dario Marianelli‘s score. It all whirls together into a cinematic horror show five miles above sea level. The disorienting melange of emotional dread, vertigo-inducing photography and Marianelli‘s wall of sound all made Everest a film that threatened to make me throw up.
Supplementary kudos to Kormákur for making the first hour, which mainly involves what critic Rubén Rosario aptly describes as “essentially scenes of people in tents talking” just as painstakingly tense. Because when you boil it down – and boil it down screenwriters William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy have – the Everest Disaster was not only the result of inclement weather but inclement business. That “first hour” of the film plants these seeds diligently.

There were simply too many paying customers attempting to climb at the same time. Hall allies with Mountain Madness founder Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal) in hopes to ease the pressure cooker that is too many cooks in the kitchen, or in this case too many climbers on the mountain. But their marriage is one of human error, lingering antagonism and miscalculation. Delegating tasks between them, essentials go misplaced. Each compromise conducted by the adventurers-turned-businessmen – the delegation of rope duties, the strategic placement of oxygen tanks, the queuing up “as if at your neighborhood Walmart” – is a crimson-stained link in their ultimate demise.

The poisonous mixture of business competition, Sherpa rivalry, and lack of oxygen allows Kormákur the space to make Everest into a harrowing cinema experience the likes of a great horror film. And from the purely grotesque survival elements that the characters must endure to their off-putting dependence on an element in short supply (oxygen), Everest plays like a horror movie at 29,029 ft. That is manages to be as moving as it is impeccably well-made is just icing on the cake.

CONCLUSION: Marrying top-notch technical alchemy with excellent performances across the board and a narrative that’s universally powerful, ‘Everest’ is a big picture triumph – the tentpole spectacle film that 2015 needed. Consider IMAX a must.