The Summit of the Gods

The Summit of the Gods (Le Sommet des dieux, 2021) is a French animated film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Patrick Imbert. It adapts the Japanese manga by Jiro Taniguchi: photojournalist Makoto Fukamachi spots an old camera in a Kathmandu shop that may have belonged to George Mallory — the British climber who vanished near the top of Everest in May 1924 alongside Andrew Irvine, leaving behind the question that mountaineering has never fully settled.

That question pulls Fukamachi into the orbit of Habu, a reclusive climber pushing himself toward the summit in ways that look less like ambition and more like disappearance. The film moves between the journalist tracking Habu through the present and reconstructed glimpses of what Mallory and Irvine may have faced in their final hours. The two threads share the same obsession: what drives a person to climb something that will very likely kill them.

The animation is spare and deliberate — dark rock faces, thin air, silence. It plays nothing for spectacle. For viewers who find most animated films too loud, this one is a rare counterweight. Stream The Summit of the Gods (2021) online on iFILM.