If you fancy a documentary series of the kind that makes you look away from the screen to stop suffering, this is, without a shadow of a doubt, The dark wizard (The dark wizard), on the HBO Max platform. It is as distressing as it is addictive. You will very possibly devour the four episodes in one go. It is the story of the mountaineer Dean Potter, an expert in free climbing and wingsuit flying. He revolutionized highline –walking on a slackline suspended between cliffs– and was the main driving force behind free BASE –a discipline that combines climbing without any safety and BASE jumping–. Potter needed risk and adrenaline. His story, told by his close friends, constantly drifts between motivation and recklessness.The series is directed by two experts in mountaineering documentaries: Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen. Beyond their talent for telling stories that hang by a thread thousands of meters high, they have the ability to be very demanding of the quality and dramatic intensity of the stories. They dose the information and the emotional evolution of the protagonists very well.The dark magician also has the virtue of revealing an inner story linked to another very famous mountaineering documentary that won an Oscar in 2019. It is Free solo, the film that recounted Alex Honnold's ascent of El Capitán, a vertical wall in Yosemite National Park, without ropes or any safety system. That documentary showed above all the psychological dimension of a protagonist who, at any moment, could fall to his death in front of the cameras. What was not explained in that documentary now emerges in the HBO Max series. In fact, Honnold is one of the witnesses who reveal, with surprising coldness, his relationship with Dean Potter. In The dark magician the competition, not always honest, between both climbers is made clear, and how their rivalry influenced the risks that Potter was willing to take so as not to lose prominence.The documentary series explains the extreme personality of Dean Potter and leads the viewer to question the motivations of these climbers who constantly flirt with the possibility of falling into the void. Traumatic childhood experiences, lack of limits, mental health, and narcissism are aspects that run through the story and provoke contradictory emotions in the viewer. The compilation of archive images is magnificent, especially for reconstructing Potter's personality, and the metaphorical resources of birds give a more symbolic and mystical dimension to the story. From the beginning, there is a restlessness that seems to foreshadow the end. An adrenaline-fueled and dizzying documentary series that, when you finish it, reconciles you with daily routines and the peace of boredom.
