The world’s high places are having a moment. Not only is there a minor publishing boom in books about our fascination with mountains, there have been some dramatic films too, partly driven by advances in technology that allow us to get intimate with these rugged landscapes in ways we never have before. In the wake of Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest and the documentary Meru, both released in 2015, comes Mountain, an exploration of our modern fascination with the world’s orogenic zones.

It is a dizzying experience. Mountain brings together some of the strongest adventure sport cinematography of recent years, ricocheting around the planet, from Nepal to New Zealand and Austria to Antarctica, in an exhilarating game of vertical pinball. Few of these locations are identified. It’s the physical beauty of mountains that are explored here – not their actual locations. The adventurers appearing in the film aren’t identified either, nor is what they do set in context. We are left to marvel at what the outliers of our species are capable of achieving.

Mountain is Australian director Jennifer Peedom’s follow-up to the much grittier, Bafta-nominated Sherpa, which was all about disadvantaged mountain people taking excessive risks on Everest while working for wealthy foreign tourists. I worked as a consultant on that film and was struck by Peedom’s determination, working and living at over 5,000 metres, to cover every angle of a complex story and her sensitivity to the subject. I also admired her secret weapon on that project, the American film-maker and climber Renan Ozturk.

Ozturk is also the visual lynchpin of Mountain. He shot most of the arresting sequences in the film, some drawn from his earlier work on landmark adventure documentaries such as Meru and the Last Honey Hunter. If you’ve been at one of the increasing number of mountain film festivals in recent years, you will recognise some of these scenes. If you haven’t, prepare to be amazed. The opening sequence is Ozturk’s work, showing his friend Alex Honnold, the most famous solo climber in history, perched on his toes hundreds of feet up El Potrero Chico, a limestone cliff in Mexico, with no rope to break his fall, casually shaking out both arms at the same time. It’s enough to make your palms sweat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Humans put into perspective in a climbing sequence from Mountain. Photograph: Felix Media

Yet despite all the thrills, Ozturk’s most arresting footage is of the mountains themselves, unadorned by human intervention. There are some ravishing sequences in Mountain – the long, lingering gaze of someone enthralled and intimately aware of how light in the mountains can melt and shift in moments. If the film is part enquiry and part love letter, it is Ozturk who brings a lot of the visual rapture, underpinned with a soaring, deeply romantic score from the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The film’s philosophical perspective is developed from Robert Macfarlane’s book Mountains of the Mind, whose eloquent words on our fascination with mountains are heard throughout. Willem Dafoe, in a voice that seems to emanate from the throne room of the mountain gods, narrates. It is very much a western perspective.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Film-maker Renan Ozturk (right) during the filming of Mountain

“The idea barely existed,” Dafoe tells us, “that wild landscapes might hold any kind of attraction.” Well, up to a point Willem. That might have been the case in the Christian west, where animist traditions were first suborned and then subverted. In that narrative, mountains certainly were on the cultural fringes. Yet in many parts of the world, mountains have remained a central part of the mystery of life and of its most pressing issues too: climate change, which isn’t mentioned in the film, and the fact that many of the world’s conflicts are fought in mountains, as marginalised people use the wild terrain as their only advantage.

The European fascination for mountains, born from Romantic notions of the sublime and a growing scientific understanding of how they were formed, segued predictably into mass tourism. Mountain tracks the dispiriting consequences: the all-consuming ski resorts and road networks that nibble away at the wildernesses, “replacing mystery with mastery”. It also poses some awkward questions about the impact consumerism has on the daredevils in thrall to social media. Money from Red Bull might let you you live the dream but it’s a hustle; the mountains neither know nor care how many Instagram followers you have. I liked that Mountain watched such antics only from afar, humans playing their games against the kind of throat-catching beauty that only deep time can provide. The mountains, as Macfarlane writes, “watched us arrive. They will watch us leave.”

• Mountain is released in the UK on 15 December; mountainmovie.co.uk

Ed Douglas’s latest book is The Magician’s Glass: eight essays on climbing and the mountain life (Vertebrate Publishing, £14.95). To buy a copy for £12.71 including UK p&p visit the guardian bookshop