‘Tenzing’ movie review: Genden Phuntsok is Mr. Amazing in Jennifer Peedom’s soulful ode to an overlooked hero

A beaming Genden Phuntsok lights up Jennifer Peedom’s moving act of historical restitution for a pioneering legacy dwarfed by colonial vanity

Updated - October 21, 2026 11:35 am IST

A still from ‘Tenzing’ | Photo Credit: Apple TV

The very human impulse to be the first to do something has propelled generations towards the poles, into the ocean’s lightless abyss and beyond the atmosphere, all for the absurd but undeniably potent distinction of having ventured where no human has gone before. The twentieth century made a mythology of such endeavours, lionising the figures who planted flags at the end of the impossible. Few have been short-changed by selective bookkeeping from the frontiers of such heroism as acutely as Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa mountaineer who reached the summit of Mount Everest alongside Edmund Hillary in 1953.

Based on true events, Jennifer Peedom’s Apple TV feature chronicles the life of the titular climber — played by Chinese actor of Tibetan descent Genden Phuntsok in his English-language debut — whose extraordinary familiarity with the Himalayas and spiritual reverence for Chomolungma (the mountain’s Tibetan name) eventually carry him towards one of humankind’s most consequential achievements. Encouraged by his wife Dawa (Thinley Lhamo) and aided by expedition secretary Jill Henderson (Caitríona Balfe), Tenzing fights for recognition as a climber in his own right, persuading British expedition leader Colonel John Hunt (Willem Dafoe) to accept him as a formal member of the climbing team rather than merely the dutiful Sherpa expected to carry its equipment. His eventual partnership with Kiwi mountaineer Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) gives the film a sense of historic camaraderie.

Peedom’s previous documentary, Sherpa, examined the mountain folk whose indispensable labour sustains Everest’s commercial and sporting ambitions. She approaches her first narrative feature with an evident interest in correcting the historical framing that made Hillary the internationally recognisable face of the 1953 ascent while leaving Tenzing comparatively obscured. The film draws on Ed Douglas’s biography Tenzing: Hero of Everest, which explores Tenzing’s early life and his substantial organisational responsibilities during the expedition, grounding the drama in a life considerably more complicated than the iconic photograph of two men standing at the top of the world. The disparity in their subsequent recognition remains galling: Hillary and Hunt were knighted, whereas Tenzing received the George Medal, a civilian honour for bravery; a difference that has drawn criticism from Tenzing’s family and estate. Against this history, Tenzing makes a persuasive case that the distinction between the man who supposedly conquered Everest and the man who helped him do so was never merely a question of mountaineering merit.

The film begins its excavation of Tenzing’s ambition on the Tibetan Plateau in 1924, when a young boy (Samdrup Dorje Lama) gazes longingly towards the breathtaking Chomolungma. He watches, fascinated, as foreign mountaineers arrive. Among them is British mountaineer George Mallory (Johnny Flynn), whose ill-fated expedition and brief encounter with Tenzing plant the seed of a lifelong obsession.

A still from ‘Tenzing’ | Photo Credit: Apple TV

The narrative subsequently moves between Tenzing’s childhood, his early adulthood with Dawa, and the climber he becomes in 1953. As a member of the Bhotia community, Tenzing has already spent much of his life negotiating a sense of otherness among the Sherpas, making his position on the expedition a sort of outcast twice removed. His intelligence and formidable climbing ability eventually earn him greater responsibility and respect, along with an almost ceremonial formal inclusion in the otherwise all-white climbing team, but Peedom remains attuned to the expedition’s entrenched class divisions and the casual racism underpinning its hierarchy.

Where Defoe’s Hunt approaches the expedition with the quintessentially British conviction that Everest is a problem to be solved through the strategic subjugation of an adversary — even preparing his contingent for what amounts to “the siege of Everest” — Tenzing approaches Chomolungma as the sacred mother goddess she is to him. His Rinpoche at the monastery articulates this distinction, instructing him to climb the mountain “like a child climbs into his mother’s lap”.

A still from ‘Tenzing’ | Photo Credit: Apple TV

Tenzing’s spiritual quest, however, does not render the other Sherpas oblivious to the indignities of their circumstances, with Tenzin Jigmey’s Pasang providing the film with a welcome, snarky counterweight to its protagonist’s extraordinary patience. Pasang sees through the expedition’s grandiosity, recognising that the Sherpas’ back-breaking toil is little more than the human scaffolding for a bunch of imperial peacocks to strut around in the afterglow of borrowed heroism, as men who “get to pretend they are heroes.”