You won’t believe much of it for a second, but Fall offers a bit of guilty pleasure fun and thrills.
In the opening scenes, best friends Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) are cheating death, going for max adrenaline rush while rock climbing with Becky’s husband Dan. Not a spoiler because we’re just minutes into the film: Dan falls to his death on this outing.
Flash forward exactly 51 weeks. Becky is depressed and drunk most of the time, but Hunter is not only a thrill-seeker, she’s a social media maven who goes on adventures just as much for bragging rights on Tik-Tok or Instagram as for the experience itself.
Hunter talks Becky into climbing a 2000 ft. tower with her – a way of getting back in the swing of the daredevil outings they used to share.
My main complaint is that a movie that essentially becomes a one location (on top of a tower) story should be very short – 90 minutes, max.
I mention this because the ladder that they have climbed for the whole 2000 feet breaks off and leaves them stranded on a small platform on the top of the tower. There number of things they can do, from a narrative standpoint, seems finite; there are lots of close calls and strokes of bad luck (including the most overused the trope of the decade: no cell phone service available, oy), but 107 minutes worth? Not really.
But writer/director Scott Mann has cooked up a third act that jerks us from the mid-section doldrums and gives us a way out that is both very imaginative and highly improbable. I have tread carefully to avoid spoilers, but there is a huge twist in the final act that ties up things nicely, realism be damned.
So suspend your disbelief and climb on up!
‘Fall’ | 3 out of 4 stars | PG-13 | Get Tickets Here | From Lionsgate
