There’s a haunting quality to Ecuadorian Oscar submission “Behind the Mist,” Sebastián Cordero’s intimate documentary on scaling Mount Everest. On one hand, Cordero’s twinning of mountaineering and filmmaking reveals spiritual similarities to both endeavors. On the other hand, his visual texture reveals hidden layers through its lo-fi aesthetic — one that emerges by necessity, given the harsh conditions — resulting in images that feel introspective about their own creation.

Cordero’s main subject is Iván Vallejo, the first Ecuadorian to reach Everest’s peak — without the help of Pxygen too. After achieving this feat in 1999 (and again in 2001), Vallejo hopes to commemorate his climb by returning to the top of the world in 2019. Naturally, he invites Cordero along to document him, but the filmmaker and the mountain maverick have opposing ideas of what the movie (and perhaps, movies in general) should be.

This search ends up taking philosophical form, as the “Europa Report” director trades in a moon of Jupiter for the peaks of Nepal, as seen through a DIY digital camera following discussions about everything from Camus to family issues with Vallejo. At its simplest, the movie captures scenes of the famous mountaineer against the pristine, icy Himalayas as he reminisces, and explains his point of view on art and adventure — a line that slowly begins to blur.

However, this more retro documentarian form is often broken up by a roving lens that seems to fall, most often, on religious tradition and iconography, as though Cordero were looking to the region’s Hindu and Buddhist traditions for cinematic enlightenment. At one point, he even follows the camera around an enormous, spinning, cylindrical prayer wheel housed in a hut, as though he were praying for answers. With each revolution, the camera enters a darkened space, filled with visual noise, before emerging back into the light near the dwelling’s door, as if to achieve a form of temporary enlightenment before losing it again. This process, which happens multiple times throughout the film, also embodies the cycles of birth and rebirth in the aforementioned faiths — not unlike Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s documentary “Manakamana,” in which the camera moves through light and dark spaces along a cable car to a Nepalese temple — as though Cordero were nearing liberation through enlightenment, or nirvana, but not quite achieving it.

The movie’s rough quality feels intimate and spontaneous, though the duo’s sense of time is discombobulated, as mirrored by alternating shots of sped-up and slowed-down footage. All the while, temple bells ring in the background, weaving together even the most disparate-seeming images into something rhythmic. Images and dialogue are often edited parabolically; they overlap to emphasize the herculean nature of scaling an enormous mountain and creating from imagination, as though they were born from the same impulse — the same curiosity.

.... continued on Variety

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