Joyce Glasser reviews Fall (September 2, 2022) Cert 15, 107 mins. (Digital Platforms 14th November and Blu-ray & DVD 28th November)
Scott Mann directed low budget action films The Tournament and Heist and now adds another descriptive, pithy title and a credit as co-writer (with Jonathan Frank) to his C.V. with Fall. You don’t go see a film like this if you are prone to vertigo. And you don’t go see Fall for the writing, although Mann sets himself the challenge of finding new ways to sustain the thrills once his two heroines are stuck on the top of the abandoned B67 Television Tower 2,049 feet up in the Mojave Desert.
An overly long prologue provides the backstory. Hunter (Virginia Gardner) and Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) are scaling the rock face of a mountain with Becky’s husband Dan (Mason Gooding) supporting and encouraging her. When he falls to his death Becky disappears behind a wall of grief so thick that even her concerned father James (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) cannot penetrate it. Her only company is the bottle.
Then, a year after the tragedy, Shiloh Hunter phones on a mission to bring her friend back to life. She proposes that on the anniversary of Dan’s accident, they climb the abandoned B67-TV tower and at the top, scatter Dan’s ashes across the Mojave Desert. Just why Becky alone is hanging on to those ashes and can alone decide where to dispense with them is something we have to accept as a romantic image.
After much persuasion, Hunter collects Becky and off they go to the tower, reputed to be the fourth highest in the world at 2,049 feet.
This is where the film really begins, and it’s one of those anticipatory car rides where “don’t do it” is written all over the screen. For one thing, when they pull out of a stop, they are nearly crushed by an ongoing truck. For another, when they arrive at the tower the fence is locked with a big warning sign and the area is awash with vultures munching on the carcass of a deer. Mann makes use of foreshadowing here and the birds of prey, symbols of death, will, for the next three days, be pecking at the women’s flesh wounds and, tired of waiting for them to die, helping them along.
While Becky is apprehensive, Hunter, a social influencer on YouTube with 60,000 followers, is upbeat. It should be said that while the film empowers women as athletes and resourceful, not helpless, survivors, both women are good looking with gorgeous, fit bodies shown off by their scanty clothing and low cut tops.
‘This bad boy is 2,000 feet tall, and your homegirls are going to be climbing to the tippy top,’ Hunter says as the tower appears before them, twice the height of the Eiffel Tower, but far slimmer. In place of a staircase there is a flimsy ladder that, for 1800 feet is inside the metal A-shaped structure, and then, for the remaining 200 feet is outside. It looks terrifying but it is a half-hour climb for these experienced Alpinists.
Yet as they climb, we are not the only ones who notice just how abandoned the tower is. Bolts jump out of their holes in an emphatic fashion, while steps disappear with close ups forcing us to register the danger. After making it to the top, scattering the ashes, and taking daredevil selfies, Hunter tells Becky: ‘next time you feel afraid, I want you to look at these and know you have nothing to be afraid of.’
The next time comes pretty rapidly as no sooner have the women started the descent then enough has come unhinged for the outside ladder to become dislodged from its skinny pole, which proves too slippery to climb down. Becky, who is dangling from a rope wrapped around Hunter, is pulled back up to a narrow shelf that is in the shape of a dish around the pole, just above a satellite receiver. Their rope is just too short to reach it and a rucksack with water in it on the receiver.
Ironically, though up at the top of a TV tower, there is no reception. Positive that their trespassing has alerted the locals, and knowing there is a signal at the base, Hunter puts her phone inside one of her shoes, pads it with her bra and throws it to the ground. In a tense scene, it is collected by a man with a dog. Instead of alerting the authorities, the man and his female partner steal Hunter’s car.
During the next hour we are entertained with the duo’s ideas for settling in for the first of three nights on the tower and alerting others to their predicament. Later in the film, when they eventually recover the drone Hunter has brought along, and there’s not enough power for it to fly, Becky (Hunter is wounded jumping to the satellite receiver) scales to the very top of the pole, between the shelf and a light bulb socket at the pinnacle and charges the drone.
You do wonder why not one of Hunter’s 60,000 devotees, has taken the initiative to alert the authorities after not hearing from their guru after the climb. She has promised her acolytes more photos and news, and when her feed is silent, alarm bells should have been ringing across social media.
Inevitably, in every thriller you need down time and that’s where the hackneyed narrative comes in. When Becky notices a tattoo on Hunter’s leg, the cat is out of the bag, and the two women, now co-dependents, turn out to be rivals for the late Dan’s love. The film turns into a morality tale in which the penitent Hunter, who cheated on her friend (although it takes two to tango) has to make amends.
Once the narrative is out of the way, we are back to CGI thrills that, for a $3 million budget, are remarkable. Even with CGI, you still spend a few minutes of the film wondering where the director and Miguel “MacGregor” Olaso’s IMAX camera are. What is even more commendable is that Mann wants his low budget film to be seen on a big screen, not on a phone as part of someone’s streaming service.
So go see it on a big screen if and while you can. For if you can get over Hunter’s admission of infidelity with Dan, (which liberates Becky more than the climb does), there’s another bit of narrative that is innovative in this genre and creepy enough to be more at home in a ghost story. Watch closely, for not all the effects of the women’s traumatic experience are physical. Becky, in a state of shock, is half living in the land of the dead, even before a vulture starts attacking her and the starving prey turns predator.
