I wonder if it’s the pandemic which has reminded us of our fear of the outdoors? Or did we always know? Regardless of where you stand on that question, the specific perils of climbing have appeared in a couple of films this year: The Ledge blended a dangerous climb with some dangerous pursuers, which kept things busy enough to generate some decent, plausible scares. Fall (2022) has no pursuers, but as the main characters are an absolute danger to themselves and others, this suffices. A film clearly intended for the big screen, and the bigger the screen the better, Fall is as exasperating as it is exhilarating; no, scrub that, it’s far more exasperating, but that does become part of the fun…after a while. In the meantime, you get to think about the horrors of being Very High Up, and these look pretty good on screen for those who enjoy (?) a good stomach-lurch or two.
We start with a kind of a prologue which, by coincidence, is almost exactly the same prologue used in The Ledge: a tragic climbing death and the fallout. We see three climbers ascending a sheer mountain face, which is going really well – right up until it isn’t. Well, that’s climbing. One year later, one of the survivors, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) is still taking the loss of her husband very badly: she’s pushing people away, refusing to hear reason (though it’s not until later in the film that you start to wonder if she’s physically capable of reason.) The choice before her is simple: keep drinking, or, link up with the other survivor, her friend Taylor (Virginia Gardner) and embark on a potentially suicidal climbing scheme, despite not having climbed anything for a year. Why doing some more climbing to get over a dreadful experience with climbing is the best course of action is beyond me – it’s like a kind of blockhead homeopathy – but here’s what they decide: to go and climb a remote 2000ft radio tower, with Taylor, who is an influencer, natch, filming their progress all the way. Sure thing! Sign me up!
The girls make their way to the tower where, if they were superstitious, their near deaths in a road traffic collision en route would have put them off, but nope, up they go – remarkably quickly, actually, so there’s not too much preamble before the dizzying heights begin to appear on screen. The girls are not privy to what the audience sees, however, in an array of macro scene set-ups worthy of the Final Destination series: rusty bolts, straining cables and failing structural elements neatly line up a series of unfortunate events which sees the girls both conquer the tower, and get stuck up there. What to do?
Look, this isn’t a cerebral piece of work. You knew that. You might not have known how far this was going to go, stupidity-wise, but the central idea was clear: two girls, with no appropriate clothing, with no clear idea what to do in a crisis, with no responsible adults on stand-by (with the exception of Taylor’s social media followers, who seem to miss the crisis because they’ve moved onto cat videos) have scaled an abandoned 2000ft structure in the middle of nowhere. Depending on the kind of viewer you are, you may: broadly sympathise with their plight; get mesmerised by the genuinely effective circling and panning shots; and/or despair of the writing, which tries to hurl in a dollop of sexy (the push-up bra becomes a character in its own right), a dash of tragic backstory, and an escalating sense of danger which largely stems from the sequence of events, ranging from eyebrow-raising to bloody unlikely to watch-through-hands stupid.
Still, the action sequences are pretty good and clearly have some budget behind them, with some effective and plausible sense of threat, even though the film has been re-edited to make it a PG-13 and so omits some of the expected pay-offs (and all of the f-bombs). The key idea here, though, is in the threat of harm rather than revealing it, so the relative bloodlessness is not a huge impediment. Sure, the plot strains and chafes along the way, but the spectacle does remain intact, using largely seamless edits. It’s at its best at its simplest, all told, though the temptation to add in some extra texture with some flashbacks and hidden twists is understandable.
It is physically impossible not to shout advice at the screen using language which would have been dubbed out of Fall, but with a certain amount of sanguinity, it remains an entertaining film – even if, in several places, probably not for the reasons director Scott Mann intended. There’s a lot of silliness in this spectacle, but once you accept this, you can enjoy this perplexing odyssey on its own terms.
Fall (2022) will close this year’s FrightFest, UK on Monday, 29th August. For more information, please click here.