Fall 2: Deadpoint

Scott Mann's 2022 film Fall, a survival thriller about a couple of thrill-seeking gals who climb a 2,000-foot-tall radio tower and get stranded at the top with no way down, was a damn satisfying picture. Working with a $3M budget, Mann convincingly staged this harrowing 107 minutes in ways that make you grip the sides of your chair even if you're not especially afraid of heights. It wasn't universally loved, but I thought it was about as effective as this type of movie can ever get. The sequel, however, takes all the weakest aspects of its predecessor and quadruples down on them while simultaneously abandoning everything that made the first film so powerful.

Written by Mann and his Fall co-writer Jonathan Frank, and produced by Mann and the team behind Fall, this follow-up is directed by German-Australian identical twins Peter and Michael Spierig (Daybreakers, Predestination, Jigsaw). The film stars Harriet Slater as Jax Hunter, the timid younger sister of the original film's Shiloh (seen in flashbacks played by Virginia Gardner reprising her role). When we meet Jax, she is grieving her sister's death when an old friend of Shiloh named Lucee (Arsema Thomas) shows up and convinces the traumatized girl that the best thing to do to get over her fears, anger, and survivor's guilt around the loss of her sister would be to pick up where Shiloh left off. The next thrilling challenge the adventurous Shiloh had planned for herself was the deadly plank walk on Thailand's Mount Kwan. So the two total strangers hop a flight, hire a guide (Tom Brittney), and before you know it, they're scaling the dangerous, long-closed-to-tourists mountain face and walking the perilous centuries-old wooden-planked path that wraps around it thousands of feet above the ground.

It just so happens that these folks are crossing the long-restricted path at the exact moment when heavy rain and an earthquake cause multiple landslides that take out several sections of the 700-year-old plank structure (what are the odds???). The guide seems to fall to his death, though there is never any doubt in your mind that he'll be back, leaving the two gals stuck on the most scenic corner of the mountain with no way of getting down, separated from their walkie-talkie, which hangs on one of the now-barren metal struts with no planks left to enable them to reach it.

What made Fall so damn exciting and effective was that its young protagonists were climbing an incredibly thin vertical tower, surrounded on all sides by nothing but sky over a bright, sunny desert. No matter where they, and the camera, looked, we were reminded of how far up they were. The feeling of being insanely high in the sky was relentless and kept our adrenaline pumping even as the movie moved into wonky personal details and strained narrative flashbacks. The makers of Fall 2 seem to have entirely missed the point of why Fall 1 worked. The new setting lets the characters cling to a mountain, so they seem far less vulnerable, and we only feel how high up they are occasionally, when the camera cuts to a wide or high-angle. These shots, for the most part, look like generic CGI, which is not helped by how much of the "thrill sequences" take place in the dark—at night or during heavy rain. For 90% of this picture, I didn't buy that the actors were high up on a mountain at all (compared to the near 100% of the time I not only bought that the gals in Fall were on an impossibly tall tower, I felt like I was up there with them).

Many complained about the contrived narrative beats of the original Fall, and felt the elaborate backstory and forced plot twists were unnecessary, but I thought they served the movie far more than they hurt it. I can not say the same for the writing in this bag of bullshit. It is as if Mann and Frank listened to the criticisms of their first movie and decided to lean into them rather than learning to craft backstory like great screenwriters. Fall 2 is hobbled right off the bat by giving the two leads no shared history beyond their radically different relationships to a dead person. Then, as the film progresses, more and more of each character's past is revealed until these absurd twists and developments become so hard to swallow that we lose all connection to the characters. It's hard enough maintaining empathy for two dumbass young people who arrogantly travel to another country to undertake an adventure for which they are completely unprepared and have no experience or skill for. In the first film, we understood that the protagonists had a great deal of expertise in the kind of task they were undertaking and had a fairly clear idea of what they were getting themselves into. Here, we just wanna see the girls fall to their deaths because they kinda deserve it.

On a craft level, the cinematography by Andrew Strahorn looks like CGI muck; the editing by Tommy Aagaard and Scott Gray does nothing to hide how fake it all looks or enhance the suspense; The Spierig Brothers' direction is pedestrian, with the scenes in the first act covered so inelegantly I wondered if they'd ever made a movie before. I would say the performances are terrible, but I can't imagine how even the greatest young actresses of all time could credibly put across a script in which there is an unbelievable coincidence, a hamfisted cliché, an absurd reveal, or a suspension-of-disbelief requirement every ten minutes. I saw this movie in a near-empty cinema, but I am sure that, had it been full, I would have heard the crowd guffaw loudly in at least four key moments intended to elicit gasps or screams.

This is a prime example of a cash-grab sequel that seems to have been made without any consideration for how to improve on the original. Apparently, another Fall picture is in the works with Mann directing. I hope he and Frank put a little more effort into the writing of that one, or maybe bring on a skilled co-writer so as not to suffer the fate of this picture, which seems to have the unmistakable theme that taking on a challenge that one is neither qualified for nor curious about is the best way to overcome one's inherent character flaws.