Fall
Low-budget thriller has no lack of sweaty-palmed thrills.
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I’m of the humble opinion that critics who watched “Fall” (now playing in theaters) via screener at home did themselves and the movie itself a great disservice.
I’m deathly afraid of heights and wanted to use “Fall” as a therapeutic exercise. To properly do this I felt as if I needed to watch the film on the largest screen possible. (To further the experience, my wife and I sat back row center in a stadium seating theater.)
There are instances in my life that have sparked my acrophobia and made my palms sweat. Some were experienced (visiting the Grand Canyon and annoyingly warding my wife away from the edge, riding Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio (like a dumbass I kept my eyes closed until I hit the ride’s apex at 420’) and generally just going up any incline to begin any rollercoaster … further therapy). Others were told (my grandfather was the Project Coordinator for the construction of the Sears Tower (screw that Willis noise!) and my Dad and uncle would visit the worksite and hang out on scaffolding high in the Chicago skyline, a buddy of mine was arrested for climbing a water tower in the Carolinas). Some were seen (watching Tom Cruise climb the Burj Khalifa in “Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol” or cling to the side of a departing airplane in “Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation” in IMAX). “Fall” is almost two hours of these sensations.
“Fall” concerns friends Becky (Grace Caroline Currey AKA Grace Fulton from “Shazam!” and the upcoming “Shazam! Fury of the Gods”) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner, “Halloween” (2018)). The women experienced a tremendous loss one year earlier when Becky’s husband Dan (Mason Gooding – man, is this kid having himself a year having already appeared in “Scream” (2022) and “I Want You Back”) plummeted to his death during a climbing trip the trio were taking.
Becky and Hunter processed Dan’s demise in very different ways with the former crawling into the bottle and the latter grabbing life by the horns and launching a vlog where she dons the moniker “Danger D” and performs a variety of death-defying stunts. It’s, “Tits for clicks,” as Hunter boasts.
At the behest of Becky’s Dad James (Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a small role, but lending gravitas), Hunter reaches out to her grieving friend. To bring Becky back out of her shell, Hunter suggests she accompany her in climbing the real-life 2,000-foot-tall B67 TV tower (it’s twice the height of the Eiffel Tower) located in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Becky, after much prodding, reluctantly agrees. Suffice it to say things don’t go according to plan and the ladies get stuck on a puny platform atop the tower.
I’m a fan of “Fall” co-writer/producer/director Scott Mann (check out his Dave Bautista-starring “Die Hard” at a soccer stadium riff “Final Score” if you haven’t!) and he should be applauded for his efforts here. He made a prolonged exercise in tension on a scant budget of $3 million and I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone told me it cost 10 times that much. Ably assisting Mann in his mission are Currey and Gardner, who make you feel and root for their characters even when they aren’t especially likable. The vertigo-inducing cinematography from MacGregor (“Vivarium”) also elevates the proceedings considerably
I do have some quibbles with “Fall.” The effects in the opening sequence where Gooding’s character perishes are admittedly pretty piss-poor, but they aren’t indicative of what’s to come. The filmmakers also opted to have 30-some-odd F-bombs removed from the picture using deepfake-style technology and replaced with “frick” and “fricking” in order to attain a PG-13 rating. Call me crazy, but if I were in the same situation as these women (which I wouldn’t be as I’d be too shit-scared) I’d be throwing around F-bombs like a motherfucker. Lastly, there’s a twist in the late goings that might’ve been a bit too clever for its own good. I didn’t see it coming, but believe the film would’ve been better without it.
“Fall” calls to mind movies such as “Cliffhanger,” “Open Water,” “The Descent,” “The Shallows,” “47 Meters Down” and “Crawl” and is better than a fair amount of ‘em. One lady in my screening kept exclaiming, “Oh, jeez,” as a means to relieve the tension. (I honestly don’t know what movie she thought she was seeing?) If you’re gonna see “Fall” you should definitely see it on as big of a screen as possible with someone as reactionary as this woman. It’s the summer movie that should’ve actually been entitled “Nope.”