"Fall" - Film Review
To truly enjoy Fall is to buy into its semi-unbelievable premise. Hunter (Virginia Gardner) and Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) are stranded at the top of a 2,000-foot-tall television tower in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Sure, it takes about twenty minutes of plot time to get Becky and Hunter to the tower, but does that really matter? In the same way no one is reading Playboy for the articles, no one is seeing Fall for the plot. The audience is there to see if two young women stranded alone atop this tower are going to make it down alive.
There are two reasons Hunter and Becky want to climb this tower. First, Hunter is a successful YouTuber who is always looking for the next wildest climbing adventure to thrill her followers. Second, the young women want to spread the ashes of Dan (Mason Gooding), their deceased climbing buddy, who was also Becky’s husband. He died in a climbing accident, and the experience has made Becky hesitant to climb again, despite her love for this hobby.
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Again, none of this really matters. What’s important, and what makes Fall an anxiety-inducing experience, are the creaks, the trembles, and the shaky ladder rungs. The audience is there for the near misses and the climb. Fall does for acrophobia what Jaws did for galeophobia. Gardner and Currey were not actually atop the massive tower during filming, but most of the movie was shot on a 60-foot platform at the top of a mountain. Most likely, they were acting against a green screen. It’s a testament to both the actors and the visual artists that there are only a few moments when the illusion is broken. It’s most evident when they’re pulling off a physical stunt that seems too good to be true, or the land below looks slightly off, but the illusion is mostly kept intact. Even as the audience is wondering why on earth these women got themselves into this mess in the first place, there’s something nerve-frying about their journey to solid ground.
Fall’s script leaves a lot to be desired. Unsurprisingly, it’s made up of a lot of screams and exclamations of danger. There are a few heart-to-heart moments between Becky and Hunter, as well as a mid-movie personal plot twist that seems to exist only to drag out the runtime. Fall works best when it’s simply the survival story of these women. It doesn’t need explorations of personal growth that slow the pace of the film. Survival is the most basic story of humanity, and Fall excels when it leans into that.
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The basic premise of Fall has been done a million times before. Just swap a tower for a cave, a casket, open water, an underwater research facility, a ski lift, outer space…you name the phobia and Hollywood has a survival movie for you. Audiences don’t care about the specific location or danger. They’ll show up over and over again to face their fears from the safety of a seat in a movie theatre. Even though they aren’t the ones fighting for their lives against an attacking vulture 2,000 feet in the air, Fall is undeniably thrilling for audiences.
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