The 1953 Everest summit is one of those events that got colonised by its own imperial framing almost instantly. The British press, the coronation timing, the Scott-redemption narrative — all of it conspired to make Edmund Hillary the protagonist and Tenzing Norgay a supporting character in someone else's triumph. Jennifer Peedom and Luke Davies' film corrects that record with genuine purpose, and if it doesn't always fully escape the gravitational pull of the Western gaze it's trying to escape, the attempt is honest and the execution is more than watchable. Genden Phuntsok plays Tenzing with an unforced warmth that does something specific and difficult: he makes boyish enthusiasm feel like a character trait rather than a performance of noble simplicity. The film's flashback structure — intercutting the climb with Tenzing's early life rather than Hillary's — is the clearest structural statement of intent. These scenes, including a childhood encounter with George Mallory (a quiet, well-cast Johnny Flynn), root the film in a Tibetan relationship to the mountain that precedes and outlasts any expedition. Tom Hiddleston's Hillary is handled with care. He is frank, practical, free of imperial posturing — which is either historically accurate or diplomatically convenient depending on your view, but Peedom doesn't seem interested in making him a villain. The film frames both men as outsiders to the stiff-upper-lip British expedition club, which is a smart read: it avoids the trap of simple white-man-bad reversal and lets the Tenzing-Hillary dynamic be collegial without being falsely warm. This is not a bromance. It's a romance between Tenzing and Chomolungma. Willem Dafoe as expedition leader John Hunt is underused in the way character actors often are in films that have a lot of mountain to cover. The VFX work during the high-altitude sequences is competent NatGeo-grade — vertiginous enough to remind you the stakes are real, not quite tactile enough to make your hands sweat. There is jeopardy, but the film is fundamentally about reclamation rather than survival horror, and it earns that register. The question any honest critic has to ask about a film like this is whether a Tibetan director would have told the same story differently — immersed us further, excluded the British further. Peedom raises that question herself, implicitly, and the answer is probably yes. But the film that exists, made with the reach and resources it has, does real work: it tells a global audience that the man the world called Hillary's sherpa was, in fact, one of the greatest mountaineers of the twentieth century. That matters, and Phuntsok makes it land.
