Worth: $13.00
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Cast:
Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mason Gooding
Intro:
… does manage to look authentic considering its budget and boasts great sound design, but is let down by characters we can’t really cheer for and an overreliance on melodrama rather than actual survival drama.
British director Scott Mann’s latest, effort Fall could aptly be described as the cinematic equivalent of “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
The survival thriller, set mostly on the top of a 2000ft disused television tower, will no doubt be a white-knuckle experience for those with acrophobia, but the movie fails to get off the ground in so many other areas that an experience that should be dizzying turns dull.
The movie begins almost a year previously, when extreme-sports enthusiast couple Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and her husband Dan (Mason Gooding), along with friend, Hunter (Virginia Gardner) are climbing a sheer rock face. An accident occurs and Dan plunges to his death.
Fifty-one weeks later, Becky is wallowing in grief, drinking heavily, and avoiding her well intentioned father, James (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). She tearily calls Dan’s cell phone to leave him messages about how much she misses him. Her apartment is littered with dead plants, the detritus of half-eaten take-out, and a lot of empty bottles of alcohol. Screenwriter Jonathan Frank, working in conjunction with Scott Mann, impresses heavily upon the audience that Becky is a mess.
At a crucial junction, Hunter calls and makes her way back into Becky’s life. Hunter has spent the year globe-trotting and amassing social media followers who follow her daring exploits. Hunter decides that it’s time for Becky to emerge from her grief by going on a dangerous climb. Becky demurs, but Hunter insists that Dan would want her to overcome her fears by quoting him: “If you’re afraid of dying, you have to get on with living” (or something like that, the film is chock full of inspirational cliches).
As a narrative necessity, Becky eventually agrees to climb the B27 tower – a structure that is approximately twice the size of the Eiffel Tower. Hunter and Becky drive out to the middle of the Mojave desert and ignoring the obvious signs such as “No Trespassing: Danger of Death” make their way to the rickety monolith. Along the way, the audience is treated to a surfeit of foreshadowing that has its pay-offs, but is also proof that plot sophistication is not really something that concerns Mann and Frank.
Eventually, the audience gets to see what they paid for, two women climbing an impossibly tall and decrepit tower. The focus on how vicarious the structure is, means we know that nothing good is going to come from the venture. The women reach the top and film triumphant drone footage and take daring selfies, and then, would you believe it? The ladder that connects them to the upper platform comes crashing down and they’re stuck.
Suspension of disbelief is essential to almost every horror/action/survival film. Even allowing for this maxim, Mann over-eggs the recipe. The audience needs to be at least a little invested in the fate of the characters, but Hunter and Becky are so thinly written it’s hard to care what happens to them. Purely on a technical level, Fall does tick the boxes in making it appear like the women are in peril. Although the editing could be better, the cinematography is convincing enough to get across the visceral aspect of the situation.
The movie does quite well with its limited budget in creating a tense situation that will likely make many of the audience more than a little uneasy.
Once the movie really leans into its genre, it does hold some power. Although as previously mentioned, Hunter and Becky aren’t the most appealing protagonists, it is difficult not to be sucked into the drama of how they’re going to survive. They haven’t brought food, there is no cell reception, Becky is injured, vultures wait for their prey… Each ingenious plan the women come up with is scuppered in one way or another. “Kicking fear in the dick” seems like it was a bad move on their behalf. Nonetheless, the “MacGuyver shit” that Hunter and Becky come up with is impressive.
Mann and Frank insist on creating a kind of character study of Hunter and Becky, and that’s where the movie wastes a lot of time. The script has two twists, both unnecessary, that weaken the overall tension. A tighter film would be less interested in a complex backstory for the friends and just get on with them dealing with the elements and finding a way out of their predicament. All the backstory does is highlight how both women are even less appealing that they originally seem. Melodrama is misplaced, and like the thunderstorm that threatens the tower, is a redundancy.
To say you won’t believe how the film ends is an understatement, but you really won’t believe it. Any credibility that the movie managed to garner with its strong visual presence and queasy discomfort manages to vanish. It seems that once Mann put Becky and Hunter on the platform, he really had less of a plan for their escape than they did.
Fall does manage to look authentic considering its budget and boasts great sound design, but is let down by characters we can’t really cheer for and an overreliance on melodrama rather than actual survival drama. At least twenty minutes could have been cut from its runtime and the audience would have what they came for; a tight, suspenseful survival film that plays with a very common fear. Instead Fall is saddled with implausible and grating dialogue and two leads whose fate could stay up in the air without anyone really caring.
