Fall (2022) review: an acrophobic nightmare!

Films like Adam Green’s Frozen (not the let it go one!), Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down and Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried have shown us the breathless effectiveness of the confined/stranded thriller sub-genre. Nothing quite quickens the heart like a hopeless, deadly and seemingly inescapable scenario, and some great survival thrillers have come out of such universally distressing concepts. Director Scott Mann’s Fall is one of them.

Fall sees young climber Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) struck by a great loss and left reeling, a year later she is still in a cycle of despair, when she is encouraged by her friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner) to get back into what she loves. Namely a remarkable climb…However this climb soon becomes a battle for survival, as the two ladies are stranded atop a 2,000 foot isolated B67 TV satellite tower in the desert, when the structure partially falls apart leaving them trapped!

A simple and effective survival story that is embellished by the power of the big screen, Fall is an armrest grabber, that makes great use of its technology (be it green screen or the swear-removing deep fake) to create an – at times – unbearably tense thriller. I’ve seen mega-budget fare look far worse than the very good effects in this film (admittedly an early scene looks more obvious but from there on it is great), and they really help trap you 2,000 feet up with these women. In a cinematorium, this is palm sweating, seat edge and heart in mouth stuff. I’ll admit to some looking down shots making me go quite faint at many points. 

True, a predictable sub-plot (clear from a mile off) does little overall other than add extra drama to what is an already dramatic enough situation, and we can all argue about the realism of certain sequences (blah blah) but Fall never jumps the shark. Nor takes the mickey out of the audience, instead delivering a constant plethora of thrills and what can go wrong will go wrong set pieces to keep you squirming. 

Fall is a visceral and dizzying jolt of vertigo-inducing tingles, that comes with an admirably nasty twist in the tale. One you really ought to see coming but are so engrossed by the tight direction by Mann, the spectacular cinematography by MacGregor and score by Tim Despic, that it catches you right upside the head.

The great performances by Gardner and Currey, only help more to keep your psyche on that platform high in the air, wondering how on earth this will get solved. There is also a welcome supporting appearance by Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Becky’s concerned dad James, which adds humanity to the screenplay.

Fall is a film that demands to be seen at the cinema and a strong lesson in how to excellently use and execute a concept, and a film that keeps you engaged from its early moments, to its final ones. Bonus points too for the most unexpected WWE reference in a movie in years!

A late summer leading to early fall (ahem) delight.