Der ewige Traum: Mountains, Grief, and Too Much Climbing

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, you probably only want to watch Der ewige Traum if you have a weirdly specific obsession with old-school mountain climbing footage. If you like your dramas with a side of frostbite and endless shots of people trudging through snow, you’ll be in heaven. Everyone else? You might find it a bit of a slog. It’s not exactly a brisk Saturday night popcorn flick.

The whole thing centers on Balmat. He’s a mountain guide who gets it in his head that there’s gold waiting for him at the top of Mont Blanc. Spoilers: there isn’t. He comes down the mountain only to find his kid has died while he was off playing prospector. It’s a gut punch, and the movie doesn’t really try to sugarcoat the misery.

The Mountain as a Character

The film looks exhausting to make. I spent half the runtime just worrying about the cast’s fingers. They look freezing. There’s a distinct, jagged quality to the photography that makes you feel like you’re slipping on the ice right along with them. It makes The Beaver People look like a cozy indoor picnic by comparison.

There is a sequence where Balmat just stares at the horizon after his loss, and it goes on for, I swear, an entire lifetime. It’s meant to be heavy, but it mostly just makes you want to check if your internet connection dropped. Still, you can’t deny the raw commitment on screen. These people weren’t acting cold; they were actually cold.

• The snow looks terrifyingly real, not like that fake stuff they use in modern sets.
• Balmat’s shift from greedy gold-hunter to humble guide feels a bit rushed, almost like he forgot his own personality arc halfway up the slope.
• The silence in the high altitude scenes is genuinely uncomfortable.

It’s not as manic or playful as something like Alice the Toreador. It’s somber. It feels like the movie itself is trying to climb a mountain and getting winded. Sometimes it succeeds, but other times it just stumbles over a rock and stays there for a minute.

I kept waiting for some sort of grand payoff, but the movie is more interested in the trudge than the treasure. Maybe that’s the point? If you’re looking for a brisk, punchy story, look elsewhere. But if you want to watch people suffer against a beautiful, uncaring landscape, this is your movie. Just maybe bring a blanket.