Mark Reviews Movies: THE FREE FALL

The Free Fall, Gravitas Ventures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 13, 2022

The Free Fall is a better mystery than its answer suggests. That's to say the movie, written by Kent Harper and directed Adam Stilwell, creates an overwhelming mood of uncertainty and dread, which is gradually undermined by its progression toward a fairly routine revelation and resolution.

A prologue introduces us to Sara (Andrea Londo), who arrives at her parents' home to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The slow, quiet realization that something is amiss in the house shows how well Stilwell builds and maintains suspense, and the grisly punctuation on the scene is fairly horrific.

The story proper, though, follows that event and Sara's subsequent suicide attempt. She awakens from a coma-like state with amnesia, greeted by Nick (Shawn Ashmore), who says he's Sara's husband. Like the protagonist, we have to trust him, although Ashmore is quite adept in making Nick a man of two, equally untrustworthy personalities—an almost too-compassionate partner/caretaker and a charming deceiver who clearly is hiding something from his wife. Whether the façade is for her benefit or his becomes one of the driving questions here.

The main one, obviously, is what the hell is happening to Sara, in this house, and within a series of dreams or memories—or something else entirely—that haunt Sara in her sleeping and, eventually, her waking hours. On top of that, the housekeeper (played by Jane Badler) seems to have a grudge against Sara, an infatuation with Nick, or both. Nick wants his wife to treat the help with equal contempt and upper-class anger.

Meanwhile, some other people, including Sara's sister Julie (Elizabeth Cappuccino), seem to show up in the house or outside it, but Nick insists he's keeping strangers and family members away from Sara—for her own good, of course. Are these encounters more dreams, additional hallucinations, or, again, something else entirely?

The movie is mainly an exercise in atmosphere—an entangled enigma of nightmares and traumatic memories. While Harper gradually puts the pieces of this puzzle in place (warnings from those strangers, a locked floor, a skeleton key, and a dinner party that goes from awkward small talk, to conversation about cannibalism, and to a bloody mess with gradual, frightful momentum), Stilwell plays with Sara's—and, by extension, our—perspective of what's real, what's illusion, and what's intentional deception. Londo's vulnerably trusting performance mostly keeps the game believable.

Most of this, obviously, is a lot of wheel-spinning in order to delay and obfuscate the truth of Sara's situation. On one hand, that doesn't matter, because The Free Fall is so effective in generating a cryptic atmosphere. On the other, the inherently repetitive nature of all this isn't quite worth the anticlimactic and generic payoff.

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