Fall

The premise of this survival thriller says it all. Two thrill-seeking young women climb a 2,000 foot tall radio tower and get stranded at the top with no way down. The measure of success for a movie like this is, does it scare the hell out of you and make you grip the sides of your chair even if you're not especially afraid of heights? Based on that criteria, this picture is an unbridled success. Director/co-writer Scott Mann seems to have expanded his idea for a short film to feature length by borrowing the backstory and early narrative beats from Neil Marshall’s caving-expedition-gone-wrong thriller The Descent (2005). And even if you've not seen The Descent, every contrived plot point in this story will be familiar and unsurprising to you. Since this is essentially a two-hander about people re-engaging their friendship and lust for life after a tragedy, there are few opportunities to subtly establish information that will be critical later on. So we can be all too sure that anything mentioned in the first act of this movie will undoubtedly be of vital importance later on. In that way, the film fairs poorly when compared to say, Adam Green’s shrewdly scripted minimalist thriller Frozen (2003) about three snowboarders stranded on a chairlift after the slope closes—another film this movie reminded me of.

But narrative weaknesses must be really, really awful to ruin the experience of a movie like this. What matters is—do the characters engage us enough to stay with them as they attempt something crazy and then must double down on craziness to get themselves out of their predicament. The answer is an unqualified, "Yes!"  Stars Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner rise above the script's conventions while physically convincing us that they are both capable of performing this climb and that they actually are 2000 feet in the air for the majority of this picture. While I'm sure plenty of digital trickery was used to create many of the terrifying shots, Mann made a point of not filming the majority of this movie against greenscreen in a studio. He and his team built the upper portion of the fictional B67 tower on top of a mountain about 100 feet off the ground so that the actors would really appear to be thousands of feet in the air. I can only imagine the location challenges, even in sunny Califonia, for a film set, essentially, in a single location as exposed as this one. But the effort pays off. Apart from one brief, but key, moment that looks like '90s-era CGI, this picture appears completely authentic, and you will feel your stomach sink and your heart race at dozens of moments. 

Interestingly, as the movie progresses, the tension and terror diminish. I don't know if this is because we just get used to being up high, or because the things we witness in the film's first half are far more credible than what happens as the characters become more and more desperate. The initial climb up the ladder is scary enough, and the most terrifying moment of the film is simply when the two women must transfer from the interior ladder that goes up most of the tower to the external ladder for the final part of their ascent. That kind of frightening move is something a great majority of us have experienced some version of, though to a far less extreme degree, so it taps into memories and tangible fears that are connected to our own experience. While the script is predictable, the film works so well because by the time the scares wear off, we have become invested in the characters. Also, the reveals we know are coming are not played melodramatically but subtly, as if there only to contextualize the movie's premise with its themes. The long-simmering interpersonal emotions that arise in the later parts of the story are allowed to be coloured (hell, practically overridden) by the more immediate emotions of fear, hopelessness, and contemplating one's impending mortality.

The film was shot in IMAX. I was not aware of it playing in IMAX theatres, but it should certainly be seen on the biggest screen possible!

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