"Fall": review

Becky (Grace Currey) looks worried while Hunter (Virginia Gardner) activates her air bags.

Directed by Scott Mann and starring Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, "Fall" is a 2022 thriller with a threadbare but tense plot involving two women—both experienced rock climbers, one of whom lost her husband—who decide to climb the 2,000-foot-tall B-67 TV Tower (fictional, but based on a real-life tower), which proves to be rusty and rickety, not to mention a character in its own right.

The movie begins with three climbers: Becky (Currey), her husband Dan (Gooding), and Becky's fearless friend Hunter (Gardner). They're scaling a tall cliff out in the mountains somewhere (and for a movie in which geography plays such a key role, we never learn place names) when Dan slides his hand into a rocky niche to get a proper handhold, and a bird flies out, startling him. Dan slips off the cliff and plunges downward, stopping only thanks to a secured climbing rope. Unfortunately, the rope's clip gives way (shades of "Cliffhanger," whose beginning plays out exactly the same way, but with the gender roles reversed), and Dan falls to his death. Becky is devastated by the loss of her husband, and a year passes during which she drinks at a local bar and listens to Dan's voice-message recording over and over as a way of keeping his memory alive. Hunter, meanwhile, has become a thrill-seeking YouTuber who climbs at dangerous locations, consistent with how she was before Dan's death. Becky's father has tried to connect with Becky to help her out of her depression and get her back to living life, but Becky deeply resents these attempts. Hunter suddenly reappears; she tells Becky that Becky's dad had called her in a last-ditch effort to get someone to talk to the desolate widow, and Hunter comes with a proposal: conquer fear by climbing the B-67 Tower. Becky is hesitant at first; she hasn't climbed since Dan's death. Ultimately, though, she relents, and the project is on. Becky has to tolerate Hunter's constant selfies and videos meant for YouTube upload; Hunter wears a cleavage-revealing pushup bra to augment her click rate.

The rest of the movie is devoted to how the trip turns into a disaster. The ladies make it to the top of the tower, where Becky releases Dan's ashes, but as they begin to climb back down, the rusty ladder that runs the final 200 feet of the tower's spire collapses, trapping the ladies at the top, where they huddle on a narrow platform, totally exposed to the elements. Frustratingly, the backpack containing their shared supplies (water, a drone, etc.) has fallen onto an antenna outcropping that may or may not be within reach of their lone rope. The young women think of several strategies to call for help. At one point, reasoning that they can regain a cell-phone signal by dropping Hunter's cell phone to the ground inside a shoe padded with clothing to blunt impact, they desperately type out a text message and drop the phone off the tower. This moment will become significant again near the very end of the film. They also try writing a note and attaching it to their drone, which they hope to fly back to their motel, but nature or karma has other plans. 

For a film about wide-open spaces, "Fall" often has an intimate, claustrophobic feel, probably because the two women spend so much time trapped on that top platform, exposed to the wind, the cold, and the mercilessly bright sun. "Fall" also features an interesting twist before the end—one that I won't reveal, but which some watchers might be able to predict. As I mentioned above, the story's plot is simple and spare; one critic calls this sort of movie a "bottle film" in which a character or characters are bottled up in some situation (as with "Gravity" or "The Martian") and must somehow contrive a way to get home or to get to safety using wits and skill, with a bit of luck thrown in. Our female leads are both capable actresses; you sense Hunter's excitement about the challenge of climbing the tower, as well as Becky's mounting dread, which competes with her depression despite her having said yes to coming along. The film generally avoids some of the hoarier clichés native to bad-decisions-seen-a-mile-away movies, but there are still some boilerplate, predictable "something bad's about to happen" moments. I saw some reviews that complained about certain special-effects scenes, but for my money, those problems were mostly confined to the CGI vultures that begin to attack the women as they weaken.

Overall, if movies are primarily about emotional experiences, then "Fall" did its job and left me feeling tense throughout most of its run time. I didn't see the plot twist coming, so it was genuinely surprising for me. I liked the movie a lot, but it serves as a reminder of why you'll never see me trying to scale any old, rusty, 2,000-foot towers. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Becky's dad; he's fine in the role, but the dad barely figures into the plot except as a bookend device. Oh, come to think of it, the story contains another plot twist, but this one was absurdly easy to figure out from the not-so-subtle hints near the beginning of the film. "Fall" has its flaws, but I found it to be thoroughly entertaining, and while I've never seen the two principal actresses before, I suspect they're both going places. The movie apparently made $22 million on a budget of only $3 million, which is pretty impressive. If you're looking for something taut and suspenseful, and you're not too afraid of heights, this could be the movie for you.