Mark Reviews Movies: FALL (2022)

Fall, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2022

While it might not seem as if there's much dramatic potential in the high-concept (no pun intended—okay, maybe a bit intended) premise of Fall, the screenplay by director Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank does figure out some clever ways to keep this one-location survival tale moving—at least dramatically. The setup revolves around a pair of climbers, grieving the loss of a husband and a friend, who become stranded atop a 2,000-foot tower in the middle of nowhere in the desert somewhere.

No, there isn't much to the plot, which has the two women trying a variety of ways to survive and be rescued and not fall to their deaths, but Mann knows there doesn't have to be. The fear-based spectacle of the story does most of the work here.

That spectacle amounts to the simple processes of the women climbing this tower, becoming stuck on a small platform near the very top of the structure, and then trying to stay alive, while having to do some dangerous maneuvers in order to obtain or use the equipment that could sustain them or help their rescue. They don't even need to do anything for peril to be the result. After all, that platform is so small that it doesn't even contain a body lying down on it, and dehydration and starvation and exhaustion start to set in, doing nothing could be just as deadly as rappelling down the tower or climbing further or, for that matter, even just falling asleep. A single unconscious turn or roll could lead to a fatal fall.

In terms of straightforward suspense, then, the film is convincing enough. It's convincing on a visual level, too, which comes as a bit of surprise, considering the cheapness of the effects in the prologue. In that scene, we meet Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who are avid rock climbers on an outing with Becky's husband (briefly played by Mason Gooding).

The whole sequence feels as if it shot as an afterthought, since we more or less get all of the information throughout the first act. Additionally, the green-screen effect of the husband dangling from a line above a long plummet to death is shaky—figuratively, because it's bad, and literally, because the footage of the ground seems to be moving separate from the camera showing the guy hanging above it.

Almost a year after the husband's death, Becky has become reclusive, save for regular trips to a local bar where she drowns her sorrows. Her father (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) tries to help her out of her depression (in some admittedly awkward ways that are more an act of foreshadowing than sound grief counselling), but it's Hunter, whom the father calls to have her check on his daughter, who gets Becky out and about finally.

The friend, who has gained an online following for her climbing videos, has a plan to scale an abandoned, 2,000-foot television broadcast tower, which once was the tallest structure in the United States but is now just a tall hazard. The two take a trip out to the desert where it's located, and upon looking up at the tower (after passing a couple portents of doom in a pair of vultures), Becky has to get a pep talk from Hunter. If she can get over this fear, Becky won't have to be afraid of anything anymore.

That's a good enough psychological and emotional excuse for getting the two women to climb the structure, as Mann's camera cuts away to close-ups of rattling metal and loose bolts and rusted-out joints to an almost sadistic degree. That's a compliment.

Anyway, Becky and Hunter make it to the top, and there's one, final sickening close-up of the ladder's last bolt coming out of its bracket and falling toward the ground. One has to admire Mann's relative patience in that moment, which sets up a trap waiting to be sprung, instead of just springing right into the action.

Mann and Frank clearly take the advice of Alfred Hitchcock to some extent, because, while the bolt coming loose as Becky is on the ladder would have been a shock, the unsupported ladder awaiting one of the women to put her weight on it is suspense. There are plenty of similar traps here, and while some of them are obvious (the main one that gets the women stranded, obviously, but also a bag with all of the pair's equipment, those vultures, and a trick to get electricity from a light socket), a few aren't as expected (such as how and why tension forms between the two friends).

The rest of what these characters do, as well as how and why they end up doing those things, is best left to be discovered. For most part, all of those actions make some kind of sense or, at least, aren't too dumb or out-of-character to be a distraction (Hunter, for example, definitely should re-adjust the line she's hanging from in one key moment, but we know she's just reckless enough to ignore that advice from Becky). Even when there's a bit of hiccup in the logic here, the sheer terror of the setting, the impressive effects used to make the situation look like the real thing, and the lead performances carry the film through those snags. A later revelation, which initially feels cheap, even gives Mann a chance to subtly shift the tone and approach from daring thriller to hopeless horror.

The premise of Fall may be utter simplicity, but there's admirable cleverness to the complications it presents, as well as technical complexity to pulling off the film's central trick. It mainly works, though, because the filmmakers embrace the simple, inescapable terror of the film's gimmick.

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