I’ve never been that afraid of heights, but you’ll never catch me climbing up the side of a mountain or jumping out of a plane. I don’t have that daredevil gene that makes me want to do stuff like that. Back in 2023, our family visited Yellowstone, so we took a ride on the Beartooth Highway that runs through the Rocky Mountains in parts of Wyoming and Montana. As I was driving that gorgeous roadway, I will admit that I became quite “weak in the knees” a few times as I drove near some very steep edges. The more I think about it, I don’t really like heights that much, but I’m willing to deal with them as long as the payoff is awesome and the risk isn’t too crazy.
FALL is one of those movies that takes whatever fear of heights may be lurking beneath our surfaces and forces us to deal with them from the comforts of our own living rooms! I kept looking at my wife because it was hard for me to look at the screen, and my wife kept telling me her palms were sweating. This lady spent a decade as a flight medic, but she was still struggling.
The premise is about as simple as it gets. A year after a devastating mountain climbing tragedy, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) reluctantly agrees to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot television tower with her thrill-seeking, social-media obsessed best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner). Once they reach the top, the ladder collapses, leaving them stranded 200 stories above the desert with almost no supplies, no way to call for help, and only some vultures for company. This all happens in the first 30 minutes. For the remainder of the film’s 107-minute running time, the ladies will have to do whatever they can to survive.
The film succeeds because it understands exactly what it wants to be. This isn’t some deep character study about a person’s quest for the rediscovery of peace and happiness after unimaginable pain and suffering. No, this is all about creating tension, and sometimes nauseating tension at that. Every rusty rung and loose screw on the way up foreshadows the characters’ fate. Once they’re stuck at the tiny platform at the top, the camera constantly looks over the edge, forcing us to experience the mind-blowing heights and the growing desperation right alongside the characters. These are the scenes where I had to keep looking away to maintain my own sanity!
As you might imagine, this isn’t the most realistic movie in the world. It’s one of those movies that keeps setting you up to think something good is just about to happen only for things to continue to get worse. Then again, as an audience we know when watching these types of movies that things have to keep going wrong or the movie would be over way too soon. FALL definitely works best if you just go along for the tense ride, without thinking too much about some of the finer points. From that standpoint, I was able to really enjoy the film, even when some of the twists and turns along the way threatened to go too far.
I wasn’t really familiar with their prior work, but Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner do fine jobs in the lead roles. As the grief-stricken Becky, Currey does the heavy lifting as we see her go from being completely broken, to almost giving up hope, before finally finding the courage and resilience to battle for survival. As the free-spirited, certifiably insane Hunter, Gardner has plenty of enthusiasm and charisma. Once they’re stuck at the top, she also shows a lot of bravery as well. The movie spends almost its entire runtime with these two actresses, so their chemistry has to work, and it does. I’ve always liked Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and it was nice seeing him as Becky’s dad, even though it’s a small role.
One of the best things about movies is that they have the ability to take us places we would never go on our own. Not in a million years would I ever climb the rock cliff of a mountain or a 2000-foot TV tower. But FALL took me up that tower and made me feel something. It made me uncomfortable, it made me a little sick, and it made my hands sweat… and I liked it. And all from the comfort of my own living room.
Through the Shattered Lens 