DIRECTOR: Scott Mann
CAST: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mason Gooding, Julia Pace Mitchell
RUNNING TIME: 107 mins
CERTIFICATE: 15
BASICALLY…: A pair of climbers get stuck at the top of a 2,000ft radio tower in the middle of nowhere…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
A word of advice: if anyone ever asks you to climb an abandoned, rusting skyscraper of a radio tower in the middle of the desert, without anyone else knowing where it is you’re heading, and with next to no backup plan in case something goes drastically wrong, do the honourable thing instead, and show that person Fall to prove why exactly that is a very, very bad idea.
Director and co-writer Scott Mann’s latest is a survival movie that banks itself on testing the senses of its viewers, as well as playing with their fear of heights so much that it wouldn’t be surprising if some people felt nauseous whilst watching it. However, it mostly works, as a dizzying spectacle of pure tension and some rather impressive visual illusions to pull off its central concept, with characters who you honestly don’t mind spending an entire movie trapped more than 2,000ft above ground with.
That, by the way, is roughly the height of the aforementioned desert radio tower that climbers and best friends Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) decide to make their next conquest. It’ll be especially poignant for Becky, who’s been spiralling down a cavern of depression and alcoholism after her husband Dan (Mason Gooding) met an unexpected end during a spot of mountain climbing – where it more or less duplicates the opening to Cliffhanger – and hasn’t had the courage to do much else since, not even contact her doting father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, making the most of his very limited screen time). Hunter, meanwhile, is a YouTuber with a niche for doing the most daring stunts across the world, so climbing a giant radio tower in the middle of nowhere shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for her or her semi-reluctant friend. Unfortunately, just as they finally reach the top, the ladder they’ve been climbing up suddenly falls apart, leaving them stranded at the top of the world with increasingly fewer resources to send help or survive.
Like Beast, it’s a simple enough survival movie to explain, but not quite as easy to watch, only because you’ll mostly be doing so through the gaps in your fingers, especially if you have a severe fear of heights. We spend a lot of the movie on top of this tower, which means a lot of camera angles that are looking down on the seemingly eternal plunge to the bottom, and the way that it’s shot you feel that tingling, borderline queasy sensation almost every time you’re forced to stare directly down at a hard surface that’s at least a good few miles down. That does signify how impressive the visual effects are, particularly with how the vast background landscapes are captured, leading you to believe that you’re just as high up as these two characters are, to a point where you start to wonder if they actually did film the movie 2,000ft above ground (and if so, Tom Cruise had better be dialling the filmmakers as we speak to help him make the next Mission: Impossible movie). Also helping is that the two lead performances by Currey and Gardner are strong and likeable enough to keep you invested in their play for survival; even though one of them is an intentionally obnoxious YouTuber who films nearly everything on her phone (to where she’s almost hit by a truck whilst vlogging behind the wheel), they’re not one-dimensional and do have some very emotional scenes that do hit hard because of how well the actors are pulling it off.
Almost appropriately, nearly everything that doesn’t work about the movie is when we’re firmly on the ground. Beyond the Cliffhanger-aping opening (which even the parodic intro of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls felt more natural than), the movie opens with a lot of generic dialogue and conventional character introductions that are prototypical of this kind of movie, and this script doesn’t do much to deviate from this familiar path when setting up its later thrills. Even when we are on top of the tower, there are still some unnecessary moments of drama that are clearly there just to pad out the movie (this movie might set the record for the highest altitude for a discussion about a secret love triangle in film history), and a twist later on is pretty easy to predict, only because it’s the kind of revelation that has been done so many other times in two-hander survival movies like this, that you’re almost waiting for it to reach that point here as well. It’s also one of those movies that feels like it just ends, with a conclusion that feels oddly rushed and anti-climactic even after being rather intense and unnerving throughout most of it.
For all its faults, Fall is still a decent thriller that is entertaining and well-made enough to give you the sweet illusion of an adrenalin rush for a good ninety or so minutes. Beast is the survival movie I’d still recommend the most, only because it perhaps contains fewer outstanding flaws in its filmmaking and writing, but this would be a pretty sweet – not to mention vertigo-inducing – movie to go straight into afterwards.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Fall is an effective survival thriller that’s boosted by some impressive visuals that accentuate the unfathomable heights that the lead characters have become stuck at, and some strong performances by the two lead actors, but some overly conventional writing and unnecessary drama end up softening the impact.
