PEOPLE CLIMB MOUNTAINS "BECAUSE THEY'RE THERE." What could be less ideological? Yet the most famous subset of climbing movies — the German mountain film — is inextricably associated with Nazism. That's not simply because one of the genre's stars (and later, directors) was Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous maker of Triumph of the Will. Even before Riefenstahl muscled her way onto the cinematic slopes as the star of such films as Piz Pälu (referenced in Inglorious Basterds) and her own delirious The Blue Light, the German mountain film celebrated the specialness of the German "race," and denigrated other cultures. Directed by sometime Riefenstahl co-star Luis Trenker, 1934's The Prodigal Son is about a Bavarian climber who scales the artificial heights of Manhattan, but flees the callousness of American capitalism for — yes, really — benign, harmonious Germany.

So it's no simple matter that the protagonists of German director Philipp Stölzl's visceral North Face are apolitical Bavarian mountaineers. In 1936, they attempt to conquer "the last problem of the Western Alps" for personal satisfaction, not national glory. When Toni Kurz (Benno Furmann) and Andi Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas) begin to scale the almost-sheer 5,900-foot north wall of Switzerland's Eiger, they're in direct competition with Willy Angerer (Simon Schwarz) and Edi Rainer (Georg Friedrich), Austrians who are Nazi Party members. (Their climbing equipment was even provided by the notorious, soon-to-be-purged SA.) While the Austrians can't wait for their homeland to become part of a greater Germany, Toni and Andi ignore politics. Our heroes are introduced cleaning latrines, a job that shows their status in the local militia whose uniforms they wear. They're mavericks, not joiners, in a country that's about to undergo a group-think nightmare.

North Face is based on actual events, but is heavily fictionalized. The four climbers were actually part of the same team, not competitors who became allies only after blizzard conditions threatened their climb and their lives. And the script, written by Stölzl and four others, invents a romance between Toni and childhood friend Luise (Johanna Wokalek). A shy underling at a Berlin magazine that's looking to print stories of German physical and spiritual superiority, Luise reveals to her swinish boss Henry (The Lives of Others's Ulrich Tukur) that she knows the climbers. Henry takes her along to cover the ascent as a photographer, from a base camp that's a luxury hotel. By means of telescopes at the cliff's bottom, the editor and other pampered onlookers can watch Toni and Andi's triumph — or catastrophe.

For non-climbers, North Face's quest will be somewhat inexplicable, if not simply absurd. The Eiger's top had already been reached from the other side by mountaineers, and the peak-beating Swiss had actually built a cog railway inside the mountain. Tourists could ride to overlooks carved out of rock, and watch the nearby climbers inch toward their goal. Later, when it becomes clear that the four men will not reach the top, Luise uses the interior railroad in an attempt to rescue as many of them as possible.

As the railway's night watchman tells Luise, Eiger is a cognate of "ogre," a monster that devours people who come too close. And it so does, in chilling, vertiginous sequences that depict rain, snow, avalanches, falls, and worse. Stölzl, who consulted Touching the Void director Kevin Macdonald on mountain filming, uses closeups, long shots, and widescreen compositions to make the upward (and, later, downward) struggle both intimate and sweeping. In the 1920s and '30s German mountain films, the heights were enchanted. In North Face, they are cold, bleak, and deadly.

As portrayed here, Toni and Andi are strong, near-fearless men. Yet they are not successes, and this is pointedly not a heroic film. The story is characterized by serious miscalculations and minor but potentially ruinous mishaps: At one crucial moment, a group of rescuers find they've brought the wrong length of rope. Stölzl redeems the German mountain film from the Nazis, even sending Luise off to New York, the city that spat out The Prodigal Son (where she becomes a photographer of African-American musicians). He also reclaims the genre from pre-WWII notions of manly self-sacrifice. North Face is exhilarating, but it's not exalting.

NORTH FACE — 2009, 121 min; at the Avalon Theater and Landmark E Street.

ANOTHER OF ROMAN POLANSKI'S HORROR TALES of an innocent plunged into corruption, The Ghost Writer has certain thematic resonances, both personal and political. But the script, adapted from Robert Harris's novel by the author and Polanski, is irredeemably lame. The taut, moody vibe of the movie's first half can't compensate for a scenario that's as dumb as any in the overrated director's back catalog — and that includes such prancing-devil piffle as The Ninth Gate.

Ewan MacGregor plays the unnamed "ghost," an apolitical as-told-to specialist. He's hired in a hurry after a previous scribe washes up dead on the Massachusetts island where former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) is secluded in his publisher's poured-concrete modernist beach house. (The island is not identified, but various details indicate Martha's Vineyard.) Also barricaded in the bunker are Lang's smart, devious wife (Olivia Williams) and his flirty yet stern assistant (Kim Cattrall); both are clearly integral to Lang's career.

That career, it seems, is about to end badly. Lang is, roughly, Tony Blair — a Brit neoliberal who supported a brutal American misadventure in Iraq. But The Ghost Writer is set in an alternative universe where such powerful ex-leaders are actually punished for their misdeeds. In this world, Nixon and Reagan probably went to jail, and Dubya is about to be indicted. So Lang is under investigation by the World Court for his role in allowing the CIA to torture British subjects suspected of being Islamic terrorists. Since the majority of industrialized countries are signatories to the treaty that created the World Court, Lang will be safest in the most affluent nation that isn't: the U.S.A. In other words, Lang is trapped in the country that alleged child rapist Polanski is trying hardest to avoid.

The director's legal jeopardy explains why The Ghost Writer was shot mostly in Germany, with Berlin standing in for London (where the "ghost" is hired) and the Baltic coast for the Massachusetts shore. Oddly, the substitute landscapes aren't the most questionable aspect of the film's attempt to pass off Europe as the U.S. Like the "American" films of Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, Polanski's movie is hobbled by tiny implausibilities: When the ghost heads to the mainland, he's offered a "return" ticket rather than a "round trip," a supposed American says "weekEND" rather than "WEEKend," and various bit players speak English like Britons or Germans. These are minor slips, but they certainly don't boost the movie's verisimilitude.

Eventually, the clueless ghost happens upon some of the information uncovered by his predecessor, and starts pursuing these leads. At this point, The Ghost Writer ceases to matter. The film's last three major events — two deaths and a bit of literary decoding out of Kabbalah for Dummies — are laugh-out-loud preposterous. In New York and L.A., where Polanski's film opened the same week as Scorsese's flashy but senseless Shutter Island, some critics have hailed the former as the more substantial of the pair. Certainly The Ghost Writer is the more restrained, at least in style. Finally, however, the two movies are equally hollow. Where one trivializes Nazi concentration camps, the other toys with Guantanamo and "black prison" tortures. Rather than given the work heft, these exploitations of real suffering just emphasize how fundamentally unserious both films are.

THE GHOST WRITER — 2009; 120 min; at Landmark E Street and Bethesda Row.