Fall (2022).

The Stage.

Two experienced climbers wracked with guilt from a past accident climb one of the world’s tallest structures, an abandoned television tower called Tower B67.

The Review.

The film starts off with a little free climbing ala Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible II. Three friends, Becky, Hunter (her best friend), and Dan (her husband), all share some playful ribbing as they claw their way up the face of a mountain. The joking comes to and end pretty abruptly when Dan makes what I can only assume is a rookie move, stuffing his hand into a cave, which releases a bird, startles him, and sends him down the abyss to his death.

Time passes and one day Hunter visits Becky (who isn’t doing well) and says the only way she’ll be able to get over Dan’s death is to climb up to the top of this insanely high abandoned tower to sprinkle his ashes from it. Yeah…forget therapy!

Early in the morning, the two make their way up the tower, surprisingly ill-equipped for what was supposed to be a morning jaunt but ends up being a lot longer when the ladder used to get up to the top of the unit breaks off, leaving the two stranded thousands of feet up in the air. With no food, water, or phone signal, the two have to figure out a way off of the tower other than falling really, really far.

It’s really tough to make a premise like this work over the course of an hour and a half because the options the characters have to try are so thin. Films like Frozen, Open Water, and 47 Meters use a similar formula. The success of a film like this is twofold: First, does the setting itself give you anxiety? And second, do the characters make smart decisions? We’ll tackle the second first. The characters in this film are not smart. We know this within the first ten minutes of the film because they’re climbing up this tower with only a fifty foot rope tethered between them and really nothing else. It’s a “One falls, they both die” kind of scenario. Now I’m no climber, but there’s got to be a better way to do this. At the beginning, they have two cell phones and a drone, but they get no cell coverage on the tower. So they drop one of their phones, padded inside of a shoe, lower to get coverage on the ground. Why not fly the drone down there with one of the phones tied to it? There are several moments where the decisions these girls just baffled me.

As for inducing anxiety, Fall absolutely delivers on its poster’s premise. It’s definitely vertigo inducing seeing the shots of these girls at the top of this massive tower. I don’t know how Scott Mann and his team shot this, but it works. The journey looks perilous and every movement as the girls sit atop this rusty structure is butthole puckering. If you’re afraid of heights, you might want to avoid this. I’m not afraid of heights, but there were moments, especially the inciting incident that maroons them atop the structure that put my heart in my throat.

Unfortunately, the script for this film isn’t good. Written by Mann and Jonathan Frank, there are two glaring flaws. First up are two late film twists, one that pits the girls against each other, a twist that was absolutely unnecessary and only felt like it was put in the film to add a few extra minutes of dialogue. I think the film would have been much better off if the girls seemed like best friends and Hunter was more supportive vs. the douchey, selfish sidekick we got. And the other twist was already done with 47 Meters Down, produced by the same people that produced this film. Not only was I surprised they went there again, but the beat just felt really stupid here. The other flaw is how the film ends, which I won’t get into, but it was abrupt, anticlimactic, and eschewed some natural drama that could have been a layup for a shot at a rescue attempt. I actually wonder if something was scripted and just wasn’t shot for budget reasons because it was a big time let down. Oh, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan shows up for about 2 minutes because he must have owed Mann something after their movie Heist in 2015.

The End.

If you’re going into Fall looking for a perilous spectacle, you’ll definitely be entertained. The film delivers on the danger it promises and it looks fantastic. If you’re looking for a well written story with rich, interesting characters, and realistic electronic gadget charging times, you’ll be let down. But hey, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon at the theater.