Film Review: Fall

I can’t say I ever expected to say this, but this movie from Buzzfeed Studios is actually pretty good. Fall is a genuinely pleasant surprise, one of the biggest surprises I’ve experienced so far this year. It’s a very straightforward b-movie, you have two good friends, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who reunite after experiencing a tragedy a weirdly specific 51 weeks prior, and the two decide to do what they both love doing – climbing. Hunter picks out the new target, an old radio tower that stands at a comical 2,000 feet into the sky. Naturally, things don’t go quite as smooth as you’d expect, and the two end up stranded at the very top with no way down.

It’s a very straightforward b-movie-ish premise, and the film knows how to take advantage of its simplicity for maximum thrills. Though there are extra details to add at least a little bit of meat to the otherwise bare bones genre exercise. Becky is dealing with the loss of her husband, Dan (Mason Gooding), it’s led to her having a drinking problem, shattering her social life, and placing a further divide between her and her concerned father, James (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who was never particularly fond of Dan to begin with. There’s also an additional aspect to the film that I won’t spoil, but it’s easy to see coming once the film drops a major clue in a picture early on.

A lot of these elements are admittedly pretty stock for this kind of movie, but director, Scott Mann, and his co-writer, Jonathan Frank, know to get to the good stuff fast, and the film breezes by most of the necessary character setups, and quickly gets us to the tower. Once the two friends start climbing, it becomes one hell of an anxiety-inducing ride that had me for pretty much the rest of the film. It helps that the two leads are terrific, and work off each other really well, managing to make even some of the more cheesier lines or plot beats come across as genuine and earnest.

I’m only familiar with one other Scott Mann film, the pretty fun Dave Bautista vehicle, Final Score, so it comes to no surprise that he is able to craft a fairly thrilling feature here. And there’s a lot to love in how he pulls it off. Major props have to go to the VFX team, who likely utilized a mix of compositing, green screen, maybe a few location shots, and sets, and they truly make you believe you are sitting two thousand feet up in the air with these women, and cinematographer, MacGregor, is able to create some really stunning shots that play with the contrast between our characters isolated in this one spot while being surrounded by a vast desert.

I was also reading up on an interesting fact about the film. It was originally shot with no particular rating in mind, allowing the leads to swear quite a bit, but when it was soon mandated that the film be PG-13. Scott Mann just so happens to be the co-CEO of an AI company that revolves around deepfakes, and they were able to dub audio and manipulate footage, all through AI, to remove all but the allowable two f-bombs. It’s remarkably seamless, and even when one character says “freakin” one too many times in a short span, it looks legit and intentional, with no signs of post-production tinkering.

What Fall really does well is capture the feeling of a nightmare, but not in the sense that we usually use that comparison, it isn’t nightmarish in a surreal way, it’s nightmarish in a tangible way. Like one of those dreams that seems mundane at first, but then it becomes apparent as a nightmare when one scary element comes into focus in a highly exaggerated way. That’s what Fall feels like. It isn’t just that the two characters are stranded in a tower with no way to contact anyone, they’re stuck two thousand feet into the air, on this behemoth of a structure that is already rusty and easy to break apart. I found myself chuckling a few times whenever it cuts to a wide shot of the tower, not because I found it funny (actually, it is a little amusing how freakishly tall it is), but because its very presence was intimidating. It does help that I am not good with heights, so anyone else with that phobia needs to approach with caution. But otherwise, this was a well performed and thrillingly constructed survival film that might not break new ground necessarily, but performs all the necessary tasks with as much impact as its can muster, and I’d say it’s a success. This was such a pleasant surprise, and it’s one that is worth seeing on the biggest screen available.

Fall is now out in theaters.