Fall is a short but exciting movie that maybe didn’t get seen by many people. It turns out to be one of the most overlooked movies of 2022. Scott Mann is a British director who has made a few big-name action thrillers, like The Tournament with Robert Carlyle and Ving Rhames, Heist with Robert De Niro and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Final Score with Dave Bautista and Pierce Brosnan.
This time, Mann’s thriller is a survival movie that combines old-fashioned storytelling with modern technology in a way that makes the movie seem both real and scary. This movie also shows how fear, obstacles, and loss can be overcome and how strong women can be.
Survival thrillers from the past are making a comeback this fall.
Fall is about Becky Connor, a young woman who climbs with her husband Dan (Mason Gooding, who was in the fifth Scream movie) and best friend Shiloh Hunter (Grace Caroline Currey from Shazam! and the upcoming sequel) (Virginia Gardner, who looks and has the charisma of a young Reese Witherspoon). Dan dies tragically when he falls off a mountain while they are rock climbing on it. This makes Becky very sad and makes her drink a lot and take a lot of pills.
Becky’s depression reminds me of Sylvester Stallone’s character in Cliffhanger, a skilled mountain climber who feels bad that he couldn’t stop his partner’s girlfriend from falling off the mountain they were climbing. A year after Dan died suddenly, Hunter talks Becky into climbing a 2,000-foot TV tower in the desert with her (inspired by the Sacramento Joint Venture Tower, the tallest structure in California).
Becky and Hunter make it all the way to the top of the radio tower, but there are times when the climb seems to be going wrong because the tower’s ladder is very old, rusty, and fragile, with screws that are about to fall off and the ladder shifting. This may remind people of suspenseful survival thrillers like William Friedkin’s 1977 movie Sorcerer, in which Roy Scheider and his men drive through an unstable bridge with dynamite in their truck.
There are also some similarities to the thriller The Edge, which came out in 1997. In that movie, Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin work together to fight a big bear after their plane crashes, but they also have their own problems when Hopkins finds out that his wife had an affair with Baldwin. In Fall, Becky finds out that Hunter had a secret relationship with Dan. Despite this, the two women still love and care for each other as friends desperately trying to get out of the tower after the ladder breaks.
Fall makes good use of technology in an old-fashioned story.
Fall is a survival thriller with a simple plot, and the main characters use technology all the time. Technology is also an important part of the movie. Hunter posts pictures and videos of her climbing trips with Becky on social media with her iPhone and a selfie stick (Instagram). The selfie stick also helps them get their backpack and gear from below the top of the tower. Becky also has her iPhone, which has pictures and videos of her with Hunter and Dan that are important to her, as well as Dan’s phone number and voicemail (so she can hear her late husband’s voice and feel better).
Becky and Hunter try to use their tech devices for more than just their own needs. They want to call for help so that someone can find them and save them from the tower. In one scene, they put an iPhone inside a shoe with extra padding so they can drop it all the way to the ground to get a signal and send an emergency message to social media. In another scene, they use Hunter’s drone to send a handwritten message to a nearby diner in the desert. Becky charges the drone with the power from the light on top of the tower and her gold wedding ring. Even with all of these attempts, the two friends can’t get help.
The book Fall uses Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest.”
One of the most important ideas in the movie is Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” idea. Becky and Hunter do everything they can to stay alive (and awake) on top of the tower, where they have no food, little water, and have to protect themselves from hungry vultures (some of which brutally kill a dog early on in the film and violently fly around the tower trying to attack the two women).
In a scary scene, Becky fights, kills, and eats a piece of a vulture that bit her leg. This gave her the strength and food she needed to stay alive. Even though this is a PG-13 movie, the vulture kill may remind some people of The Revenant, in which Leonardo DiCaprio is brutally attacked by a bear before killing it and skinning a horse to keep warm in the snow.
Fall’s cinematography is also interesting because most of the movie takes place on top of the tower and shows beautiful, sunny scenes of the desert. The filmmakers also made the actors look like they were thousands of feet up on the tower, which added to the realism (even though they were actually around a hundred feet up from the ground). The chemistry between Grace Currey and Virginia Gardner also adds to the dramatic tension of an old-fashioned thriller about survival and the power of getting through hard times.
