‘Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa’ Review: Netflix Doc

Lhakpa Sherpa holds the world’s record for most climbs of Mount Everest by a woman, having summited 10 times, but she has conquered more than mountains. Lucy Walker‘s Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa includes dazzling footage of Lhakpa on Everest, sometimes in snow and ferocious wind. But this engaging, modest and fiercely determined woman’s life is the real point here. Her story captures the doggedness that made all those climbs possible, as she goes from childhood in a village in Nepal, where she was uneducated and illiterate, to success on the mountain while enduring years as a physically abused wife and mother before she managed to leave that marriage.  

Walker takes an unintrusive approach to her subject, as she has done in previous films,  including the Oscar-nominated Waste Land (2010), about making art out of a trash heap, and Blindsight (2006), about blind mountain climbers in Tibet. She has found a vibrant personality in Lhakpa, who exudes warmth and candor, is reflective about the past, and humble yet proud of her accomplishments.

Her grammar in English may be fractured, but Lhakpa has a colorful, sometimes poetic way of describing things. On her most recent climb, in 2022, she stands on Everest with a sunburned face, and says she feels dirty and smelly, comparing herself to a “dirty old racoon” pawing through trash in Hartford Connecticut, where she has lived for over 20 years.  

The film begins in Connecticut in 2022 as she prepares for her 10th climb. Her 15-year-old daughter, Shiny, will go to Nepal with her, but 19-year old Sunny is so withdrawn into herself she barely speaks to the family, and chooses to stay behind. As the film follows that journey, it is intercut with Lhakpa’s narrative, often in an interview in which she talks to a silent, unseen interviewer.

In that interview, atypically, she wears traditional Nepalese dress, a choice that looks orchestrated and costume-y but also positions her as a cultural icon. Her story is illustrated with archival footage, including some from previous expeditions and interviews over the years as she kept breaking her own record for most climbs by a woman. But Walker and her editors have created an absorbing narrative, so the film never feels as cobbled together as it actually is.

Some segments give astonishing views of her ascents, including the most recent, with high-altitude photography by Matthew Irving. Lhakpa sometimes crosses a crevasse on a narrow ladder, and at times ascends in the dark of night. (An EPK of how they got those shots would be fascinating.) Meanwhile, Shiny waits at base camp, worrying that her mother, at a camp above, might run out of oxygen as the weather delays her progress for days.

Lhakpa’s various ascents create a throughline in the film, but the details of mountaineering are kept to a minimum as she tells her story. As a girl in a village where almost everyone had the last name Sherpa, she carried her brother to school for two hours a day but was not allowed to enter. She disguised herself as a boy to start working as a porter on expeditions, with the goal of climbing herself. That personal story provides the most honest, wrenching moments.

In 2000 she became the first woman to climb and successfully return from Everest. In an archival interview from that time she acknowledges that she had a child by a man who betrayed her with many other women. She then hides her head in her hands and walks away from the camera, as if she has internalized all the shame society sent her way.

Walker structures the documentary so we can see Lhakpa’s slow awakening to her own agency. Soon after that first Everest triumph she met a Romanian climber, George Dijmarescu, married him and moved to Hartford, where they had their daughters and worked as Everest guides. The account of their 2004 expedition is the most distressing section of the film.

Michael Kodas, a reporter for the Hartford Courant and one of the few talking heads in the film, was in the group they were guiding, and he wrote in columns from the mountain that Dijmarescu had become angry and violent. In her typically vivid way, Lhakpa says of George, “He turn look like bad weather, look like thunder, look like bullet.” He beat her until she was unconscious. Kodas includes a photo of her, face swollen, in his 2009 book about Everest, High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed. “I wish I can have the power to take out this picture. I feel shame,” Lhakpa says.

Yet she stayed in the marriage because she had no money and no power. “George took my power,” she says. Eventually, he beat her so badly in front of their children that she landed in the hospital, and a social worker helped them get to a shelter. She divorced George, cared for her daughters, and kept climbing.  “Everest is my doctor. Fix my soul,” she says.

Walker is respectful of Lhakpa’s privacy, almost to a fault. There is a brief glimpse at the start of her grown son, that first child, but his story is largely absent. A friend talks to Lhakpa and Shiny, vaguely, about George’s rough childhood, bringing Shiny to tears. But we have no idea how truthful George, who died of cancer in 2020, might have been about that.

Those gaps don’t take away from Lhakpa’s vivid presence on screen or the example she says she hopes to set for other women. Even Sunny, the sullen daughter, says at the end that she sees how to turn her traumatic childhood in that abusive household into strength, precisely the lesson Lhakpa embodies in this appealing documentary.