Dean Potter’s last morning looked ordinary enough. He and his girlfriend, Jennifer Rapp, were at their house in Yosemite in May 2015, trying on dresses for a New York gala they were scheduled to attend the next day, when Potter told her to help him choose. “Help me pick one,” he said.
By the end of that day, Potter would be dead.
The four-part HBO documentary The Dark Wizard turns on that arc, tracing how a man who had spent years trying to present his climbing and jumping as something closer to art than ego walked into the most fatal moment of his life. Potter had just returned from Germany before the trip east, and he and Rapp were set to fly to New York the next morning for the gala, where he was to receive an Action Maverick Award. He disliked New York and cities in general, but he was going anyway.
That contradiction sits at the center of the film. Potter had been trying to convince the world, and himself, that his feats were meant to express an elegant swashbuckling concord with the natural world. But in Yosemite, he had already been overtaken in one crucial sense: Alex Honnold had become the new free soloist in the valley, the climber whose name now carried the mythic charge Potter once held.
The afternoon before he died, Potter, Rapp and Graham Hunt hiked out to Taft Point. Hunt and Potter jumped from a promontory in flying-squirrel suits and swooped toward a ridge with a slot called the Notch. They did not make it. Rapp heard two thuds from Taft Point. A recovery team found two bodies in the Notch the next day.
The film’s account of the accident lands as more than a tragic endpoint. Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer directed The Dark Wizard, and Josh Lowell co-created it; the three also made The Alpinist in 2021. They have been drawn before to climbers who live on the edge of public admiration and private ruin, and here they linger on the gap between Potter’s language of elegance and the blunt mechanics of a fatal jump.
Rapp said the choice to spend that afternoon with Hunt altered everything. “That changed the course of our day,” she said. “We wouldn’t have hung out with Graham, and Dean wouldn’t have died.”
In the days after Potter died, the artist Elizabeth Streb sent Rapp an email. Rapp and Potter had first met Streb at the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, and Streb later put into words the belief that had driven Potter so far and, in the end, so recklessly: “He, like me, believed he could fly, and dedicated his life to that proposition.” The film leaves little doubt that the proposition failed at Taft Point, and that the cost was two lives in the Notch and a third forever marked by the thud Rapp heard from the rim.