Synopsis: The inspiring true story of Colorado Springs bilateral-amputee climber Mandy Horvath’s record-breaking attempt to crawl to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro and the mysterious circumstances under which she lost her legs at the age of 21.
Stars: Mandy Horvath, Julius John White aka ‘Whitey’, Carel Verhoef, Sally Grierson
Director: Edward Drake, Scott Veltri, Francis Cronin
Rated: NR
Running Length: 102 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: The Ascent is one of the most compelling documentaries in years. True crime, record-breaking athletic achievement, and a portrait of human resilience that earns every minute of its 102-minute runtime. See it.
Review:
About fifteen minutes into The Ascent, you will think about the last time you complained about being tired. Trust me, the thought won’t sit comfortably when you consider the incredible feat of determination against massive odds unfolding in front of you.
Mandy Horvath is a bilateral amputee from Colorado Springs who lost both legs above the knee at the age of 21 under circumstances so disturbing and so poorly handled by the authorities around her that the word ‘mysterious’ barely covers it. The Ascent, directed by Edward Drake, Scott Veltri, and Francis Cronin, tells two stories simultaneously: Horvath’s attempt to become the first female bilateral amputee to crawl to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro without prosthetic equipment, and the investigation into the night her world went black and she woke up in an ambulance missing both her legs.
That the film earned the Audience Award at SXSW 2026 is not a surprise. That it holds both stories in balance without letting either overwhelm the other is the real achievement.
The Mountain That Does Not Care About Your Backstory
Kilimanjaro is 19,341 feet above sea level. It is the highest freestanding mountain on earth. Its traditional Chagga name, Kilemakyaro, translates roughly as ‘that which defeats the impossible.’ The Chagga people regard it as a sacred force, something that tests every person who approaches it and is entirely indifferent to whatever they have survived to get there.
Cinematographer Laffrey Witbrod captures all of this at eye level. The camera stays at Horvath’s height, putting the audience in her perspective: every rock, root, insect, and icy patch is something she has to navigate with her hands. The effect is immediate and physical. You feel the mountain. You understand, in a way a conventional documentary angle would not deliver, exactly what each mile costs.
A Life the Statistics Never Could Have Predicted
By her own account, Horvath was not easy to love in her teens and early twenties. Her childhood involved abuse and instability. She was drawn to people and environments that reflected that chaos back at her. The night she lost her legs was, by every indication available, something that was done to her. She had a drink she had left unattended. Then everything went black. She was found on train tracks in the middle of the woods some distance from the bar where she had been with people she trusted.
The police ruled it a suicide attempt without ordering drug or rape testing. All records were subsequently destroyed. The key witness has since died. Drake, Veltri, and Cronin conducted their own investigation over the five years it took to make this film and surface details that suggest the official conclusion was not only wrong but represented a catastrophic failure of care toward a 21-year-old woman who needed the opposite.
Horvath agreed to tell the story with one condition: no live re-enactments. Animator Mike Lloyd developed a style that is both visceral and impressionistic, capturing the horror of her memories without reducing them to spectacle. It is the right call. The animation gives the film its most difficult sequences without exploiting them.
We also meet Horvath’s mother, a woman sharp enough and fierce enough that you understand immediately where Mandy’s particular brand of forward momentum comes from. Family is complicated, and everyone involved allows that complexity to be exposed to the elements, regardless of how much it might sting.Â
What Trust Looks Like When It Has Been Destroyed
One of the recurring threads of The Ascent is that Horvath’s climb is not only a physical achievement but a symbolic renegotiation of trust. After what happened to her, trusting anyone with her safety or her story was not a small ask. Drake, Veltri, and Cronin spent years earning that trust slowly. They climbed the mountain with her. They were not experienced climbers. Horvath respects them more for that.
‘They’re like chosen family,’ she says of the filmmakers and the Tanzanian guides who accompanied her, including Julius John White, known universally as Whitey, who has summited Kilimanjaro somewhere between 400 and 500 times and whose calm authority over the mountain is one of the documentary’s understated pleasures. Composer Adam Peters threads the score between the big and the small with real attentiveness. When the film is intimate, the music follows. When the mountain opens up and Witbrod’s camera pulls back to show what Horvath is crawling through, Peters matches that scale too.
Editor Jasleen Kaur keeps both narrative threads moving without letting either one go cold. The structure mirrors Horvath’s own climbing philosophy: every time new information arrives from the investigation, we return to the mountain knowing more, which means we are rooting harder.
The Summit Is Not the Ending. It's the Point.
It’s not a spoiler to say that Horvath reaches the summit. She began the climb on her 28th birthday and completed it less than a week later. That was widely reported when it happened in 2021 and the documentary does not pretend otherwise. What the film gives you instead of suspense is something rarer: the experience of witnessing what it costs a specific human being to achieve something that should have been impossible, and watching her arrive there anyway.
There is a moment just before the final stretch where Horvath is clearly operating beyond any rational calculation of what her body can sustain. The guides around her are watching with something between awe and worry. And she keeps moving. The fire and fury of the last eight years pushing her forward. It leads to a moment that is so visceral, so primal, it sent chills up my spine.
Horvath has since competed on Naked and Afraid, surviving 21 days in the Belizean jungle as the show’s first bilateral amputee contestant. She is engaged to be married. She has plans. The film captures someone who has definitively refused to be defined by the worst thing that was ever done to her and has instead built something extraordinary in the space that refusal created.
‘They say butterflies can’t see their own wings,’ she says near the end. ‘This project really showed me my wings.’
It will show you something too. I can promise you that.
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