Everest: The Other Side offers an arresting illustration of what Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin do best, pairing the nail-biting tension of a sports drama with the epic sweep of a nature documentary.

To Morrison, as well as to the filmmakers, this awful backstory makes something cathartic of his accomplishment. Many in the audience, however, will query the point of it all.

It’s impressively assembled, from its elegant and clarifying drone footage to its first-person GoPro shots of crampons jabbing into icy rock walls and pickaxes crunching into hard snow.

It is incredible. It should not exist, but it does. It is something to see — something wondrous and unsettling.