Must alpinist

While showing promise, Ghost Mountaineer crumbles beneath the weight of an uneven script, incoherent plot and story, and jarring editing. This is really too bad because it's obvious that significant and sincere effort went into making this film; but in the end it is an effortful failure.

A fascinating Estonian angle on Nordic noir, "The Ghost Mountaineer" is an excellent and original autobiographical thriller by Estonian documentary filmmaker Urmas Eero Liiv, a one-time biologist and a mountaineer. It tells the story of a group of late-Soviet Estonian university students embarking on a long hike in the snowy mountains and valleys of Buryat mountains in Siberia in search for the rare nephrite-rocks and, of course, fun. On the way, they lose one of their own and are forced to struggle with the harsh Siberian climate, their own inner-demons, perverse provincial Soviet bureaucrats, and the seemingly mysterious Buryat natives, semi-tamed by the European "civilization" of the Soviet/Russian type.

The imdb plot description and the previous reviewers seriously misrepresent this film. This is neither a youth film, nor an adventure movie. This is no horror flick or an orientalizing supernatural fantasy. It is a realistic thriller about youngsters from the European part of the USSR encountering the far-away Soviet East and its provinical colonial Russian bureaucrats. Kalatozov's "Letter Never Sent" meets with Peter Weir meets with the best of contemporary Nordic thrillers. Though the depiction of Buryats and Russian bureaucrats could have been subtler, it honestly represents the ethnic projections, stereotypes, and relationships in the USSR on the eve of its collapse, without any retroactive political correctness so typical to the morally monistic cinema today. The film's dream sequences not only shock, but also offer an interesting glimpse at how the Estonian youngsters project their culturally conditioned fears on the strange environment, and the film makes it pretty clear that this point of view has little to do with the much more complex social reality existing in the Buryat village at the time (the film was shot on location in the same Buryat village, where the actual events took place).

This is a very fine snowy thriller and an excellent debut for Urmas E. Liiv. I hope he will return to feature filmmaking very soon.

As spoilt by Nordic Noir, I can´t say that I had high hopes, regardless of its popularity in our cinemas (was among the most popular films in 2015) and some young actors who have made a name for themselves already... But I thought that realistic background and exotic locality could elevate the viewing experience. Well, apparently they did, as I decided to watch until the end, but there were really many scenes when I focused on beautiful nature and venue peculiarities - as the course of events and lines were not catchy. The most interesting character/performance appeared to be Vadim Andreev as the local militia chief, and everything supposed to be mystical was rather tedious or over-sophisticated, without logical round-up of events. The background voices of real persons brought along unnessary documentarism, plus too early in the film (they could have been involved towards the end, before or with credits).

6 points (performances and use of landscape - 7, the rest - 5) thanks to realistic motifs only. Alas, Must alpinist is a mediocre work even among Estonian films (= usually slow and made with limited budget).

Although pleasantly energetic and captivating at first, 'Ghost Mountaineer', first feature film by director Urmas Eero Liiv, falls apart by the end. Diverse group of students who most barely know each other travel into Siberia to find nephrite. Conflicts and wrong decisions are easy to come.

The film tries to be blend of adventure, drama, mysticism and horror. Oh, and this all is based on true events. The first, adventure part, is quite good to watch, but halfway through the movie, director starts to throw is some glimpse of horror through sloppy editing and eerie sounds. The trouble is - the horror moments are never quite horrifying. And there is no reason to throw in some supernatural moments just for the sake of it and leaving them unexplained. Especially when they don't add any real mystery to the big mystery itself. 'Ghost Mountaineer' was marketed as mystical horror film, but I wouldn't consider couple of dream sequences and telling an old urban legend as a horror film. It was poorly developed mess that couldn't understand it's own reason to exist beside the pure vanity and pretentiousness of the director.

P.S. Based on this movie - geologists are quite the jerks.

Basically, idiots who have never hiked together before inexplicably take the long way over mountains to get to a canyon with a semi-precious mineral. I say that because it only took them about 2-3 days out of 16 to get from the canyon to the village - why didn't they just begin at the village and cut their time in more than half???

Anyway, this is a laughable attempt at storytelling although the first, standard part of the hiking was fine - no different than idiot Americans doing the same. But the rest was ridiculous and the ending just weird.

Find another movie if you want horror.