Fall

Laser-focused and too plausible for comfort, Steve Mann's Fall (2022) is not exactly pleasurable viewing.  I found the film too frightening to be enjoyable and, in fact, regretted watching the picture, although I remained riveted to the screen.  I saw the movie on TV and can only imagine the disturbing effect the picture would have if viewed on a big screen in a darkened auditorium.  I paused the movie a few times so that I could go to the toilet and eat a banana and, for obvious reasons, the movie made me thirsty -- I found myself in the kitchen two or three times replenishing a glass of sparkling water that I was drinking.  Without breaks of this kind, I think the picture might have been intolerable.  And I will admit that the film disturbed my sleep -- I awoke several times trying to work out a solution to the perilous conundrum that the movie posed.  That said, my reaction may be idiosyncratic -- no less an eminence grise, Stephen King, the horror novelist, has said that Fall is the sort of story that he wished he had written:  it's concentrated and terrifying and, despite the immensity of some of its images, exceedingly claustrophobic, a bit like an open-air version of Poe's "Premature Burial" or the motifs of confinement in King's Misery or Gerald's Game with its heroine handcuffed to a bed for much of the film's duration. 

It's hard to explain the cumulative effect of Fall because much of the film is very predictable, featuring stock characters and very generic, even shallow, plot developments.  Clearly, the picture is a genre film and doesn't have any ambition to be more profound or significant than other suspense pictures of this sort.  The principal heroine is a plucky young woman, resourceful, but battling inner demons.  She has a kindly, concerned father who, ultimately, rushes to her rescue.  The heroine, Becky, has a spunky best friend; people encountered in the Mojave desert where most of the film is set are predictably unkind and, even, vicious -- desert rats, as such folk might be called, rarely get a sympathetic portrayal in films.  We are confident that the heroine, who grew up watching professional wrestling, will confront her anxieties and emerge stronger from her ordeal.((At one point, she faces down a menacing turkey vulture with nothing more than an intense glare.)  All of this is exactly what one would expect from a movie of this sort.  What's unexpected is the really terrifying nature of the ordeal.

The film begins with Becky and her husband goofing around on sheer cliff about eight-hundred feet high while her best friend, Hunter is scampering up the rock face with incredible skill and boldness.  The sequence is filmed realistically and the heights are palpable.  Of course, the husband falls as he tries to clamp his harness into a small cave in which an eagle apparently is living -- the bird flies into his face and knocks him off the mountain.  (Later, in the film, the malevolent eagle will be replaced by equally nasty buzzards.)  51 weeks later, as a title informs us, Becky is still disabled by grief and drinking heavily.  Her father comes to assist her but she rebuffs him and, later, even considers suicide.  She is gobbling some pills when her best friend, Hunter calls her and suggests an adventure:  to honor the dead husband, whose ashes are reposing in a shabby cardboard box, Becky and Hunter will climb a TV tower in the Mojave Desert and scatter the cremains from the top of the slender metal rail standing tall in the sky above the desert -- the tower is 2000 feet tall and was once the tallest structure in North America; it's now abandoned and slated for demolition.

Becky is dubious about this enterprise but reluctantly agrees to venture into the desert with her friend.  Hunter is a you-tube celebrity who posts her adventures on line as "Dangerous D."  On the morning of the ascent, Hunter wears a push-up bra showing lots of cleavage:  tits for clicks, she says, advising that she needs to keep her viewers engaged in her intrepid feats.  The gate on the dirt track leading to the tower is locked shut, so the two young women hike a couple miles to the isolated tower, encountering along the way some turkey vultures eating a still-living donkey.  Dangerous D takes a video of the poor donkey and posts it, remarking "Survival of the Fittest".  Equipped with a rucksack with some water and a good "4 K"drone, the women climb the tower.  The tower is in bad shape, corroded and, as the women ascend on a rickety ladder within the triangular scaffolding of the structure, we see inserts of bolts popping loose and metal grating on metal -- the tower seems in imminent danger of collapse, a point made clear to us by images of guy-wires rattling free from the concrete pads on which they are inserted.  The tower is a character in the film, buffeted by winds and a sort of immense lightning rod.  It creaks and groans and is vertiginously high.  The details as to the tower's construction and physical characteristics are established in great, and convincing, detail.  (I have no idea how the movie was made and I assume it is chock-full of CGI, but the sequences on the tower are all exceptionally realistic and very effectively staged -- the movie puts the viewer on the tip of the TV tower, 2000 feet above the scuffed and scarred desert floor that looks like something seen from an airplane.)  The sense of dread looming over the climb is oppressive, furthered by the fact that the girls were almost hit by a semi-truck roaring by on the highway outside of the motel while they were distracted, peering up at the abstract metal line of the tower against the sky.  (The script is very well-designed -- the foreshadowing scene with the oblivious semi-truck that almost hits the heroine's pick-up rhymes with a later scene in which a truck on that same highway plays an important part in the story.)  At 1800 feet, the ladder ends and the women have to clamber up the exterior of the metal scaffolding, passing by some broadcasting equipment, lobes that hang off the tower like pendulous ears.  At the very top, there is a platform the size of a "large pizza" one of the women says, a circular metal landing that is forty feet below a blinking red beacon signaling the tower's presence to passing airplanes.  In several scenes that I experienced as literally sickening, the girls dangle off the edge of the platform and take selfies showing the fantastic height to which they have ascended.  Becky scatters the ashes and, then, the two women plan to descend.  The exterior ladder, however, breaks loose from the side of the tower and plunges 1800 feet to the desert, leaving both girls stranded on the platform.  This occurs at about the half-hour mark in the film which is 107 minutes long.  The rest of the movie details the women's desperate efforts to find a way down from the tower or to summon help -- their cell-phone don't work at the height of the platform.  There are some pointless interludes -- for instance, we learn that Hunter was sleeping with Becky's husband.  But, generally, the action on the tower seems plausible, the fearsome dilemma is obvious, and the women's efforts to escape from what seems to be increasingly lethal circumstances is all very intensely dramatized.  You may have heard the expression "white-knuckled suspense" -- that term applies to this film.  The girls spend three nights on the tower, become increasingly weak, and desperate, and suffer various horrible injuries -- Becky has her leg ripped open and wound becomes gangrenous, stinking so that vultures circle the tower's top and, ultimately, attack her.  Hunter tears open her hands and can't use them after engaging in some seemingly impossible aerial acrobatics -- the film is very clever with respect to Hunter's exploits; as it turns out what we see and experience as implausible is, in fact, impossible and there is a reason that Hunter's hands can't be used after she is injured.  I won't reveal this plot development but it is a brilliant way of assimilating what seems to be implausible to the general sense of realism in the picture.  (I'll give you a clue -- take a look at the movie Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron's exploration of a similar situation; in fact, some of the terrifying sequences in Fall seem derived from Cuaron's picture.)  After a series of horrors, including Becky strangling a turkey vulture and eating it, the movie ends happily, but it's an ordeal to reach that conclusion.  

I thought Fall too brutal and horrific to be entertaining, but I have to salute the craft with which this movie was made, it's austere commitment to plausibility, and it's brilliant vertiginous action sequences.  This is the sort of movie in which you have to keep telling yourself:  It's only a movie, it's only a movie.