Fall will be torturous for anyone afraid of heights but could otherwise be a bit of a bore for someone looking for thrills that go beyond that.
Like spinning a wheel labeled with people's greatest fears and landing on acrophobia, the latest entry in the thriller subgenre of single-location, anxiety-inducing situations is Fall, a movie that will be torturous for anyone afraid of heights but could otherwise be a bit of a bore for someone looking for thrills that go beyond that. Movies like Fall don't require much character work, nor do they need much plot beyond the situation at the center of the film and Fall is no overachiever. With predictable twists and one grating character, the Lionsgate movie tries to do something different from others like it, but it can't quite reach the heights that its main characters aren't (and should be) afraid of.
Fall follows Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) who, when the movie opens, are climbing a rock face with Becky's husband Dan (Mason Gooding). When Dan tragically falls to his death, Becky is sent into a tailspin of grief, giving up her favorite pastimes of free-climbing and pole-dancing to wallow alone at the bar. Soon enough, Hunter shows up with a proposition to climb a 2,000-foot tall radio tower. Mainly, it's so she can film a drone video of Becky hanging from the ledge for her 60,000 followers. When Becky and Hunter reach the top of the out-of-commission tower, the ladder falls, and they are stuck nearly half a mile above the desert with no cell service, no water, and no way down.
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As far as survival thrillers go, Fall follows the playbook established by films like 47 Meters Down or Crawl. As Becky and Hunter look out at the desert surrounding them, Fall offers plenty of visuals that are rendered well enough, with the desert surrounding them becoming even more deadly 2,000 feet above the ground. With limited space to move, it adds a new dimension to claustrophobic thrillers, one that makes the sky just as scary as the endless ocean in survival thrillers like Open Water.
Unfortunately, it doesn't add much to the genre itself. One twist that's supposed to land with an emotional punch is telegraphed early on and in a way that will make what's coming quite obvious to keen viewers. Another twist, while not as obvious, doesn't land as well as it's supposed to. Fall's nearly two-hour runtime also makes the circumstances feel drawn out when thrillers like these are better served with brisk runtimes that don't allow for much thought in between their obligatory plot points.
As Becky and Hunter's circumstances become increasingly dire, their efforts at rescue become almost laughable. That's the problem with Fall's setup. There's not much they can do except watch from 2,000 feet in the air as their attempts fail. There's no way for them to climb down and no way for them to call for help. They must rely on hair-brained attempts at contacting those on the ground and when those fail, there's not much left. While their attempts at rescue are funny, nothing is as funny as the film's incorporation of Becky's pole-dancing skills or its use of the song "Cherry Pie" by Warrant in one nail-biting sequence.
Gardner and Currey do what they can with the material, but both Gooding and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (as Becky's father) are criminally underused, a fault of the film's setup more than anything else. Sure, the film adds a new perspective to the survival thriller genre, but it relies so heavily on the idea that heights are scary (even if its protagonists don't think so) that there's not much left beyond that by the end of the film. When Fall concludes, it commits a cardinal sin of the genre that may have audiences scratching their heads.
Fall releases in theaters on August 12. The film is 107 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for bloody images, intense peril, and strong language.
Graeme Guttmann is a critic, interviewer, and editor for Screen Rant. From reading about Brad & Angelina in Star Magazine at 11 years old to predicting last year's Oscars winners with frightening accuracy, his love for pop culture knows no bounds and will seemingly never die. Graeme joined the Screen Rant team in 2020 as a freelancer before becoming an editor for the news team in 2021. He no longer reads Star Magazine, but he does read just about everything else. In addition to his work at Screen Rant, Graeme is also a Masters of Fine Arts candidate at Emerson College in Boston, MA with a concentration in poetry. You can follow him on Twitter @pentagraeme.