Watching the Fall trailer, you'll probably find yourself in one of two camps. Either saying “yes please, get this in my eyeballs now”, or “heck no thank you very much”. Or something along those lines, depending on how attached you are to overly dramatic syntax.
A little after the trailer's release, there were the articles talking about how director Scott Mann used deepfake technology to remove a lot of the swears from Fall. As the co-CEO of Flawless, the company that developed deepfaking, this offered a double bonus for him. Both showing the benefits of the technology, and allowing his film to receive a reduced age rating and therefore a wider release.
Thankfully, the changes themselves are flawless. If you weren't looking for it you probably wouldn't notice a couple of thrill seekers in their 20s saying “freaking” instead of using harsher language, and acknowledge that as weird. Especially when you consider the absurdity of the plot.
Fall focuses on two friends, Hunter (Virginia Gardner) and Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), who come together a year after a tragic accident to climb a big freaking tower in the dessert. Since they last saw each other, Becky hasn't climbed, and has spent more time getting drunk, while Hunter has found her calling as a thrill seeking influencer. Doing more and more extreme things under the name “Danger Dee” to fund her excursions.
On their way to the tower the friends face multiple harbingers that suggest perhaps this trip isn't going to end well. A near miss with a truck and hungry vultures chowing down on a not quite dead deer. The tower itself is basically 2000 feet of rust, but despite Becky's crippling fear they press on.
The climb itself is simple enough, a very long ladder takes them up there quickly, but when they get there the ladder collapses and falls to the ground, taking their only means of escape with it. Hunter and Becky find themselves stuck on a platform the size of an extra large pizza, with no phone signal, only 50 feet of rope and a drone to help them get down.
The two women have to MacGyver their way out of their situation, which gets more precarious as injury, dehydration and starvation begin to creep up on them.
Fall does much of what you want or expect a decent survival movie to do. The performances are fine. It's tense, gnarly and unsettling and keeps you guessing about how the hell they're going to get down. The characters are different enough to each other despite being a little two dimensional, but there is some personal drama between the pair that seems pointless. It's also a bit derivative in terms of plotting. There is little here you won't have seen before, particularly if you are a fan of movies of this type.
However one thing that is unusual, perhaps due to the dry conditions (most survival movies are wet; rivers, the ocean, that kind of thing) is the use of technology. They have different barriers to help, and have to use different tools to get through them. Some of the things they do are genuinely surprising, and they have to constantly overcome their own squeamish humanity to do so. Again this is fairly typical for a survival film; characters losing themselves and becoming reborn through their trauma, but at least this time it looks slightly different.
Overall Fall is a pretty solid thriller. It's tense and gruesome, and not for the faint hearted.
Signature Entertainment presents Fall exclusively in Cinemas from 2nd September
