Fall takes “high concept” to a dizzying new level.
Of all the reckless ways to confront a fear of heights, Fall might be the most enjoyably daft. Here’s a film that doesn’t just suspend disbelief – it shoves it into a rickety metal basket and hauls it 2,000 feet into the air, daring you to look down.
Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner play Becky and Hunter, two best friends who apparently view personal trauma as a launchpad for increasingly ill-advised vertical tourism. Their bright idea to climb a defunct radio tower in the middle of nowhere is barely plausible on paper, and once the bolts start loosening and common sense is left gasping in the dust below, the script stretches the audience’s patience thinner than the tower’s rattling beams. Yet somehow, improbably, Fall makes it work – not by leaning on narrative credibility, but by sheer, sweaty-palmed, white-knuckle commitment.
Director Scott Mann understands exactly what he’s built: a minimalist survival thriller that thrives on tension, not logic. The absurdity of the setup isn’t a flaw he tries to hide; it’s practically a dare. Once the leads are stranded at ludicrous heights with no supplies, no signal, and a soaring budget of bad ideas, the movie tightens the screws with a wicked glee. It’s a masterclass in exploiting primal, almost involuntary reactions – the way your stomach drops with every lurch, the way your palms start to sweat even though you’re perfectly safe in your seat.
Currey and Gardner sell the peril beautifully, grounding the madness with performances that are raw enough to keep the stakes real even when the script occasionally reaches for melodramatic handholds. The most glaring of these is the subplot involving Becky’s dead husband (stolen almost directly from the opening of Cliffhanger) which drips through the story like a clumsy attempt at emotional ballast. It’s not that it’s badly performed – Currey handles it with conviction – but it’s hard to shake the sense that the film doesn’t need it. The sheer, awful immediacy of dangling between life and death is already more than enough to grip the audience by the throat without layering on a flashback-laden grief arc that feels like a studio note come to life.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan pops up briefly as Becky’s concerned father, mostly to remind us that there is, technically, a world below them – but Fall is at its most effective when it isolates its characters in the dizzying silence of the sky. It’s a natural heir to the minimalist survival tradition of 127 Hours, The Shallows, and Buried, but where those films found their tension in slow-burn introspection, Fall trades psychological excavation for nerve-flaying spectacle. It’s not trying to unearth anything profound about grief, guilt, or endurance – it just wants to watch you squirm in your seat, and in that, it more than succeeds.
It’s not, however, a flawless climb. A late-game twist feels a little desperate, and the final stretch asks the audience to accept a solution that’s optimistic bordering on fantasy. But when a film is this breathlessly tense, nitpicking the physics feels a bit like complaining that a rollercoaster isn’t street legal.
Fall succeeds not because it’s believable, but because it’s exhilarating. It taps into the lizard-brain terror of falling and clings there with grim, giddy determination. If you’re willing to forgive the structural wobbles – and maybe a few narrative ones too – you’re in for a heart-in-mouth ride that delivers exactly what it promises: vertigo, thrills, and a stubborn refusal to come down to earth.
