The Alpin­ist

The tox­ic glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of men who stare death in the face is present in recent climb­ing doc­u­men­taries Free Solo, Meru and The Dawn Wall. All are packed with incred­i­ble cam­er­a­work, doc­u­ment­ing some tru­ly exhil­a­rat­ing ath­let­ic feats – yet it seems that the main agen­da of these films is to roman­ti­cise the allure of the solo climber and his rugged individualism.

Enter Marc-André Leclerc, a low-pro­file, cam­era-shy twen­tysome­thing whose humil­i­ty brings a more ground­ed per­spec­tive. Active­ly shun­ning the lime­light, he seems indif­fer­ent to being this film’s sub­ject, drop­ping out mid-pro­duc­tion to go on a solo climb with­out noti­fy­ing the crew, claim­ing that it wouldn’t feel like an authen­tic solo climb had they been there.

Aside from his climb­ing feats, the film shows Marc-André open­ing up about grow­ing up with ADHD, hav­ing a his­to­ry of abus­ing hal­lu­cino­genic sub­stances, and liv­ing in a stair­well before mov­ing into a tent with his girl­friend and fel­low solo climber Brette Har­ring­ton. By expos­ing his emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in this way, it’s impos­si­ble not draw com­par­isons with Free Solo’s Alex Honnold.

Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, it’s the enig­ma of Marc-André that makes this such a com­pelling doc­u­men­tary. The Alpin­ist strikes a good bal­ance between delin­eat­ing Marc-André’s char­ac­ter and show­cas­ing some of his more aston­ish­ing climb­ing feats, includ­ing a mon­u­men­tal ascent of Torre Egger – the first solo win­ter ascent of the Patag­on­ian peak. It’s a refresh­ing alter­na­tive to the afore­men­tioned trio of films, which are too eager to put their mav­er­ick pro­tag­o­nists on a pedestal.