Fall: White-Knuckle Thriller at Once Silly and Kind of Beguiling
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B-
There is something aggressively annoying about the white-knuckle thriller Fall.
It ranks as that rare movie likely to compel viewers to recommend it just so that they can expose others to the mind-blowing idiocy of its plot — can you believe that? — while simultaneously being a movie that you can’t look away from, thus also compelling you to hate yourself.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you have the gist. On a climbing adventure, pals Becky and Hunter (Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner) witness the accidental falling death of Dan, who it turns out was Becky’s husband, and Hunter’s very good friend.
Watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Fall stars Grace Caroline Currey & Virginia Gardner
Fast-forward 51 weeks and Becky is still a wreck. Drinking, drunk-dialling Dan’s voicemail, and fighting with her clear-eyed dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who informs Becky that if the tables were turned, Dan would not be knee-deep in grief for Becky. The observation, however astute, doesn’t help.
On the very night that Becky decides to top herself, the bubbly (and also aggressively annoying) Hunter — who speaks in platitudes with exclamation points — arrives with an idea. To get Becky back on the proverbial horse, and to boost views of her daredevil YouTube adventure vlog, the pair should climb the spindly, 2,000-foot B67 TV tower, located in the middle of nowhere but just six hours from where they’re at.
Once there, they can ceremoniously and appropriately scatter Dan’s ashes, which have been ignominiously gathering dust in a FedEx box in Becky’s apartment since his death. Becky, bleary-eyed, agrees to think about it. But we know it’s a foregone conclusion. The very next morning, they’re off.
At this point, one begins to seriously tally the many ridiculous aspects of Fall past and present. These people are recreational climbers, but they don’t wear gloves. They don’t alert others to where they’re climbing. They don’t carry safety gear. Or GPS monitors. Or wear proper footwear. Or think about pee breaks.
When Becky and Hunter arrive at the massive tower (“The fourth highest structure in the U.S.!”) they happen upon a couple of vultures picking away at a nearly dead deer. Foreshadowing? Um, yes.
As they begin their ascent, the signs that that tower is structurally unfit abound. Screws falls, it audibly heaves under their weight, it’s rusty. Do our girls stop for even a second to assess? Does an adventure vlogger forget to wear a push-up bra on a climb she is filming for her followers?
Naturally, as the trailer also shows, the pair become stranded at the tippy-top after a ladder comes loose and crashes down. There’s no cellular signal, the battery-powered drone Hunter uses to film herself in weird places starts running out of juice, nighttime means not falling asleep and rolling off the platform, and those pesky vultures sense a buffet forthcoming. If all that isn’t bad enough, Hunter has a confession to make.
The rest of the movie charts the pair’s ever-bolder attempts to rescue themselves from the “pizza-sized” platform roughly two Eiffel Tower-heights in the sky. So, there’s that. And yet for all its dumbassery, Fall is weirdly beguiling, mostly because director Scott Mann puts us right there on the platform, the surrounding desert a spectacular sea of nothingness. It’s impossible to look away. Even those menacing vultures seem kind of cool (the director definitely has a thing about birds being evil), and the women are in their space.
To its credit, Fall doesn’t pretend to be a metaphor for more meaningful ruminations on life and death. It’s a female-led thriller designed to make you gasp and wince, plain and simple. You probably should see it just for the acrobatic camerawork and insane vistas. But you will hate yourself.
Fall. Written and directed by Scott Mann. Starring Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. In theatres August 12.