FALL : Tuesday 27th September 2022

I saw the M Rated 'FALL' at my local multiplex last week and this US and UK Co-Produced survival thriller film is Co-Written, Directed and Co-Produced by Scott Mann whose prior feature film making credits include his 2005 debut with 'Down Amongst the Dead Men', 'The Tournament' in 2009 with Robert Carlyle, Ving Rhames and Liam Cunningham, then 'Heist' in 2015 with Robert De Niro, Dave Bautista and Jeffrey Dean Morgan and 'Final Score' in 2018 with Dave Bautista, Pierce Brosnan and Ray Stevenson. This film was released in the US in mid-August, here is Australia on 22nd September has so far taken US$15M off the back of a production budget of US$3M and has garnered generally positive critical acclaim. 

The film opens up with three climbers ascending a sheer rock wall - two aided by ropes and harness - Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and her husband Dan (Mason Gooding) and the other free climbing Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who is also Becky's best friend. As Dan attempts to secure a clamp into a small cavity in the rock face a bat flies out and distracts him, causing him to fall. Still secured by the clamp he is left dangling some fifty feet below and his attempts to swing towards the rock to gain purchase prove fruitless and only serve to dislodge the clamp. As Becky and Hunter try to rescue him the clamp dislodges completely and Dan falls to his death. 

Fast track to fifty-one weeks later and Becky has sought solace in alcohol while distancing herself from her father, James (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), because he dared to suggested that Dan was not the good guy that Becky had made him out to be. James pleads with her to move on with her life, after catching her drunk outside a bar and trying to drive herself home. Becky refuses his pleas and shouts after him to leave her alone. She later contemplates suicide by overdosing on prescription medication washed down with a good dose of whisky. However, she is interrupted by a knock on the door and Hunter standing outside her home. Hunter invites her to climb the 2,000 feet tall B67 TV tower in the desert which is located about a six hour drive away from where they are. Becky is very reluctant but changes her mind the next morning,  and decides to go along so she can finally move on from Dan's death and scatter his ashes from the top of the tower. Arriving in the vicinity of the tower, while eating at a diner the night before the climb, they learn it was decommissioned years ago, and is set to be pulled down the next year.

The next morning, the girls reach the tower and Becky gets cold feet, but Hunter persuades her to climb it anyway and to stop living in fear. About halfway up, Becky suffers a panic attack and again tries to turn back, but Hunter tells her to keep going. The first 1,800 feet are climbed inside the triangular shaped tower but the last 200 feet must be climbed on an exterior ladder, which is corroded and loose. After almost reaching the top, Hunter jokingly shakes the ladder, causing Becky to freak. Unbeknownst to them, that shaking has resulted in several restraining bolts securing the ladder to the main frame of the tower are shaken loose. At the top, the girls celebrate their big achievement, with Becky proud of herself for accomplishing the climb in spite of her fears. Becky says a few loving words in memory of her Dan and scatters his ashes from the top of the tower, finally letting him go. 

As they begin their climb back down, however, the ladder collapses, nearly killing Becky in the process. Hunter manages to pull Becky up with the rope, and the girls are excited to still be alive, until it dawns on them that the remaining ladder is on the cage structure hundreds of feet below the narrow platform on which they now perch. With only fifty feet of rope and no way of reaching the first platform, the two girls are stranded at the top. Worse yet, their bag with their water has fallen on a communications dish about sixty feet below the platform they are stranded on. Hunter is ever confident that emergency services will have heard the crash of the ladder on the ground and are on their way, but after five hours or so, they conclude that no help is coming. The girls both have mobile phones with them, but don't have reception to be able to call for help. They try to lower the phone on the rope about fifty feet down but are still unable to get a signal. There is a flare gun in an emergency compartment with a pair of binoculars, but they do not want to use the flare until it gets dark. Becky notices a deep gash on her upper leg from where she fell when the ladder first broke away, and vultures, smelling her blood, begin to circle around the tower. Hunter realises that they had service at the base of the tower, so they send a message for help and drop it off the tower in one of Hunter's shoes, but due to the height of the tower and insufficient padding in the shoe, the mobile phone is smashed to pieces on impact with the ground.

Becky and Hunter observe through the binoculars that there is a campervan close by with two men. They wait until it gets dark and fire off the flare. The men notice them, but they steal Hunter's 4WD instead of helping them. Night falls and Becky notices a tattoo on Hunter's ankle she had not seen before. The tattoo is a numerical code, 1-4-3 that Dan used to tell Becky 'I Love You'. Hunter regretfully admits to a four-month affair with Dan that he drunkenly initiated and carried on right up until their wedding day, when Hunter broke it off. Hunter claims that this is why she distanced herself from Becky after Dan's death, and her remorse for this is why she wanted to bring Becky up the tower. The next day, Hunter offers to climb down and get the water before they die of thirst. Hunter is unable to reach it, though, as the rope is not long enough to reach the satellite dish. Hunter attempts a risky jump and manages to reach it, and has to jump to get back up on the platform. 

Hunter encourages Becky to use the drone to carry a written message for help to the diner a few miles away, but the drone's battery is failing rapidly and so they retrieve it. Hunter suggests to Becky to climb to the top of the antenna to siphon power from the aircraft warning light, a further thirty feet up. This she does and is clinging on for dear life at the very pinnacle of the tower for about a hour while the battery charges to full capacity. 

After successfully charging up the drone, she sends it on its way with a handwritten note attached, but it is hit by a truck about thirty seconds before it reached the diner. Becky confides to Hunter that she has accepted that she will likely die on the tower. Hunter reveals to Becky that she has been dead since she climbed to get the bag, having fallen on the satellite dish and bled out from a wound to the side of her head and to her stomach with vultures pecking away at her corpse. Becky, unwilling to be alone and delirious from the lack of food and water, hallucinated Hunter's presence on the tower with her for the last day or so. Becky records a video on her phone for James, saying how sorry she is for her behaviour towards him and that he was right about everything. The next morning, Becky, unwilling to give up, coaxes a vulture towards her and kills it, eating morsels of its flesh to give her some sustenance. Having used both of her own shoes in a vain attempt to signal help from the campers, Becky observes that Hunter still has one shoe left on her corpse, albeit perched on the satellite dish some sixty feet below.

She makes one last ditch attempt at survival by climbing down and jumping across to the satellite dish in order to send a text message to her father for help. Becky lodges her phone in Hunter's shoe and then jams the shoe in to the stomach cavity that the vulture had been chowing down on, and then pushes her body off the tower so it can cushion the phone and receive a signal at ground level and send the message. Becky sits on the dish and waits for help, only for the dish to also start breaking away from its restraints. James, having made numerous attempts to contact his daughter, rushes to the tower and arrives later that night, with the tower surrounded by medical and rescue personnel he alerted earlier. When James finally arrives, he sees Hunter's corpse being wrapped in a body bag and thinks it is Becky's, causing him to recoil in shock. However, he sees that Becky is alive and well and in the care of paramedics, as the two tearfully reconcile and embrace.

'Fall' is a film that absolutely most definitely needs to be seen on a big cinema screen to fully appreciate the spectacle and vertigo inducing heights that these two girls and the occasional vulture ascend to. Director Scott Mann has demonstrated his worth in delivering us a film that has action, suspense, drama, tension, emotion and a clear head for heights with just two female leads that carry this film squarely on their shoulders for just about 99% of the 107 minute run time, with stunning cinematography, commendable stunt work and spot-on special effects and all on a budget of a mere US$3M. 'Fall' is a simple story, told effectively and if you're afraid of extreme heights (as I am), then this film will leave you with sweaty palms and holding your breath for perhaps longer than you should, before the final credits role and you can blissfully exhale. However, all that positivity said, I felt short changed by the rushed ending and the unanswered question of how did Becky get down from that rickety satellite dish 1,940 feet up??

'Fall' merits four claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard out of a possible five claps. 

-Steve, at Odeon Online-