Fall

I can picture something like Fall working as a short film, or perhaps at 80 minutes or so, but at 107 minutes, the film can't help feel a bit padded.  And yet, it's undeniably effective in a lot of ways.  It's certainly a technical feat and a marvel of stuntwork.  It's only the padded script that fishes for surprise revelations that holds back my enthusiasm.  

The premise centers on two thrill-seeking best friends, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner).  In the film's opening scene, they're scaling the side of a mountain with Becky's husband, Dan (Mason Gooding), when tragedy occurs, causing Dan to fall to his death.  One year later, Becky is a depressed wreck, drowning her sorrows in alcohol and pills.  Her father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is concerned for her, and so is Hunter, who convinces her to go on one more adventure.  They will climb to the top of a 2,000 foot abandoned TV tower in the California desert, and scatter Dan's ashes when they reach the top.  During the climb to the top, the ladder breaks, and now the two women are trapped on top of the tower, with no cell service, and having to face the elements like storms and vultures.

Fall does certainly work on a technical level, and on a primal level as a simple but spellbinding thriller.  It uses its premise, surroundings and setting to the fullest, and it's all been expertly headed by director Scott Mann.  It finds ways to keep its stationary yet thrilling set up consistently engaging with its addition of the elements, and the added danger of dehydration and starvation constantly in the back of the audience's mind, not to mention the injuries that the girls suffer from during their attempts to signal for help.  The blending of the special effects, stuntwork, and performances from the two leads blend seamlessly, so the spell the film does create in a visual sense is never once broken.

It's only when the script tries to add something unexpected to the scenario that the film kind of lost its hold on me.  I can understand that writers Mann and Jonathan Frank were probably fishing for ideas to build this idea to feature length, but I'm not sure if surprise revelations that Hunter brings up while they are trapped on top of the tower was the way to go.  It feels like something out of a soap opera, and honestly, the life-threatening scenario they're in is enough to hold our interest that we don't really need it.  If this was the only wrong turn the script made, I could forgive it, but there is yet another surprise revelation in the final 15 minutes that left a bad taste in my mouth, and felt like a desperate attempt to again spice up a basic scenario.  I won't go into spoilers here, but it just seems like a desperate attempt to add an unwanted element of fantasy at the last minute in what should be a tense and realistic scenario.

Fall is one of those movies that doesn't fully work, but it does hold a certain spell over you, because of how well it's been made.  It also should be seen on a big screen, as it's sure to lose something should you watch it on your laptop.  Regardless, the movie is effective where it matters, and succeeds at being a simple and primal story of survival.

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