Two expedition teams push toward the top of the world's highest peak only to be caught by one of the most violent storms ever recorded on the mountain, in this account of the 1996 Everest disaster directed by Baltasar Kormákur.
What is Everest about?
The film follows a season of commercial climbing on Everest, where groups of paying clients and experienced guides join forces to attempt the summit together. Months of preparation, acclimatization, and logistics lead up to a single narrow window of opportunity near the top of the mountain, when weather can turn from clear to lethal within hours. As multiple teams converge on the same route at the same time, delays stack up at the most exposed points on the mountain, and a fierce storm rolls in just as climbers are furthest from safety. What follows is less about reaching the summit than about the descent, as guides and clients alike are pushed past the limits of their bodies and equipment in brutal cold and near-zero visibility. The film keeps its focus on the human cost of that decision-making under pressure — the trade-offs between ambition, safety, and the sheer unpredictability of the world's most extreme environment.
About the cast
The ensemble includes Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, and Sam Worthington among the climbers and guides, with Robin Wright and Keira Knightley playing family members waiting for news from home. The film moves between the mountain and the households following the expedition's progress, giving the large cast distinct threads to carry through the story.
Context & significance
Drawing on real events from the spring of 1996, the film sits alongside a wider body of books, documentaries, and firsthand accounts that have tried to make sense of one of the deadliest seasons in the mountain's climbing history. It leans into the physical scale of Everest itself, favoring practical mountain photography and location work over studio-bound recreation, and it treats the commercial guiding industry that had grown around the peak by the mid-1990s as part of the story rather than background detail. Viewers interested in survival stories, mountaineering, or dramatizations grounded in real disaster will find a detailed, procedural approach here rather than a straightforward action framing.
Watching Everest on Ktime
Everest is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, no additional platform required. K-Time's Farsi-first interface makes browsing survival and adventure titles like this one straightforward for Persian-speaking audiences around the world, all within a single account and catalogue.