A
film review by Craig
J. Koban October
26,
2022
FALL 
Virginia Gardner as Hunter / Grace Caroline Currey as Becky
Directed by Scott Mann / Written by Mann and Jonathan Frank
FALL is a new outdoor survival thriller that contains a premise as economical as they come:
Two women climb a 2000 foot tall radio tower and get stranded when they reach the top and have no apparent way down.
Yikes.
The genre itself has exploited the most widespread of human phobias to great effect, and if you're afraid of heights then FALL will be almost unendurable to sit through. As a person that's not afraid of heights, I found myself less frightened by the height that these poor souls are trapped at with no where to go and more by the notion that they have zero options to climb down from said height and that no outside help is reachable for them.
Now that's a scary predicament, indeed.
Writer/director
Scott Mann deserves some credit for genuine ambition with this minimalist
film and with incredibly limited resources (the film's reported budget was
just a scant
$3 million).
Mann commendably does what he can with the material and money he
has at his disposal, but FALL sometimes betrays the effectiveness of its
very premise with some questionably iffy VFX work, some ultra hammy
melodramatic plot twists, and an overall sensation that it wears out its
welcome at around 60-70 minutes. This film is 107 minutes long and
what we're left with is something that feels needlessly padded.
Also, the opening
of FALL bares more than a passing resemblance to the one from 1993's
vertically traumatic CLIFFHANGER.
During what seems to be a routine mountain climbing trip, Becky (SHAZAM's
Grace Caroline Currey) and her hubby Dan (Mason Gooding) join in with
their mutual friend Shiloh (STARFISH's
Virginia Gardner) for a day of climbing fun.
They all do manage to reach the peak of their mountain, but tragedy
strikes when Dan makes a slip and then falls to his death, traumatizing
his wife and Shiloh in the process.
When then get a flashforward (with a very awkward title card that
states "51 weeks later"....why not just say a year?) and we hook
back up with poor Becky, who hasn't moved on from Dan's death and has
become an alcoholic introvert.
Her estranged father in James (a wasted and underused Jeffrey Dean
Morgan) has been pushing his daughter to get on with her life and conquer
her battles with addiction.
In stark contrast to Becky is Shiloh, who has not only managed to
get emotionally back to a place of normalcy in her life, but has also
started a fledging career as a YouTuber.
She believes that she has the perfect medicine to heal her BFF in
the form of climbing a monstrously tall decommissioned television antenna
and livestream every aspect of their climb to her large social media
fanbase.
Becky begrudgingly agrees and both ladies pack up and journey to
the tower, although they are almost killed when a streaming Shiloh takes
her eyes off of the road and nearly collides with another vehicle.
This is a
harbinger of doom for things to come.
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The two friends
do make it to the tower and begin their climb, which Shiloh chronicles
with cell phone and drone cameras.
When they make it to the top they're greeted to a mightily
impressive sight of everything below them, but the awe-inspiring grandeur
of this moment is destroyed with the rusted out ladder that they used to
get to the top breaks apart from the tower and falls down.
Now, at this point in the film audiences will probably ask a few
logical questions, like, for instance, did they pack parachutes just in
case (the answer would be no) or did they pack a satellite phone in case
cell phone coverage was terrible 2000 feet up (the answer would also be
no) or did they bring adequate food and rations just in case (again,
regrettably, the answer would be no).
So, with no ladder, no cell phone coverage, no adequate survival
resources, and virtually no ability to contact friends, family, or anyone
on the outside world, Becky and Shiloh are hopelessly tapped.
Things gets extremely dicey when one of them sports a nasty wound
on her leg and ravenous vultures start to fly and circle overhead.
Yikes.
Worst.
YouTube Livestream.
Evvvvvver.
Again, I admired
FALL's nervy determination with this material and with a budget that
wouldn't have covered the catering on CLIFFHANGER decades ago.
I was sort of reminded of Chris Kentis' mostly forgotten, but
absolutely harrowing aquatic survival thriller OPEN
WATER from nearly two decades ago (it also featured a very basic
premise of two people being nightmarishly trapped - in their case, in the
middle of the ocean - and without any escape/rescue plan at their
disposal...and it was also made for peanuts).
That's not at all to say that FALL is in any way shape or form the
equal to OPEN WATER, mind you, but both thrillers fearlessly commit
(albeit, one more successfully than the other) to their respective
premises and try to extrapolate as much as possible from them.
I will say that the challenges of the female friends in FALL are
different and perhaps a bit more hair-raising than the married couple
stranded at sea in OPEN WATER.
Becky and Shiloh have far less, shall we say, physical freedom with
their predicament, especially considering that they have to essentially
sit on a tiny scaffold at the tip of the tower that can barely accommodate
for the both of them (and, yeah, being 2000 feet up has other challenges
as well).
FALL generates sizable nail biting terror in the initial moments of
the ladder collapse and seeing the shock on the women's faces - fully
realizing the limitless horrors that await them - really hits home.
One of the big
issues, though, with FALL is that it's only sporadically authentic when it
comes to relaying the plight of Becky and Shiloh.
This is not the aesthetic disaster that was the categorically awful
THE REQUIN from earlier this year
(which was shot entirely on soundstages doubling for real
in-the-middle-of-the-ocean settings, and it pathetically showed), and Mann
and company have somewhat wisely shot their film using IMAX cameras in a
combination of real and faked environments.
He was also shrewd enough to know that the entire film set atop of
the tower could not be entirely the product of green-screened soundstages,
so the production opted to shoot some scenes on an actual mountain with a
portion of the tower placed on top to credibly replicate what being 2000
feet in the air would be like for the actors.
In some instances, the movie fakery works in FALL, but those
moments are interspersed with others that visually come off as
aggressively phony looking, especially when it comes to background
composting.
I usually champion little engine that could pieces of cinema that
try to make due with what they have available, but watching FALL made me
constantly think of what we could have ended up with if a bigger budget
and finer effects work were used to see this vision through to the
fullest.
I
don't think that the shoddiness of the effects do this film entirely in.
What is hugely distracting is (a) how the makers seem to
desperately try to find ways to needlessly expand this film to an
unnecessarily long running time, (b) some of the truly eye rolling plot
developments that occur during the course of the film and (c) how the film
strongly adheres to Roger Ebert's coined Idiot Plot Syndrome,
otherwise know as a narrative/premise that
is "kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody
involved is an idiot."
As for the latter element, Becky and Shiloh - like many horror film
victims before them - make some categorically idiotic decision making on
their climbing expedition (some of which I've already referenced), and
seeing someone as self-absorbed as Shiloh trying to make a bigger name for
herself (and YT channel) at the expense of her friend's grief didn't make
me sympathize with her as a character all that much.
Beyond that, the script injects some thorny interpersonal issues
between the pair - that are conveniently thrown in while their trapped -
are so trivial when compared to what they're experiencing that I had to
wonder why they were introduced in the first place.
The more time that FALL spends a third of a mile in the air with
these starving, dehydrated, and slowing dying women the less and less
compelling it became because of a banal and ham-fisted young adult drama
inspired twist of fate.
And don't get me started on an even later would-be shocking twist
late in the that's equally unnecessary.
