Fall Was Unbelievably Terrifying

Are you scared of heights? You will be after this movie. Any aspirations I had of unsponsored climbing or any sort of climbing flew away in the tropospheric wind of Fall, a fundamentally imperfect movie that still manages to be one of the most terrifying thrillers I've seen in my entire life. Watching it feels like how I imagine going over the first hill of a really high roller coaster blindfolded feels. The gradually ascending tension is unbearable, and while you know that the drop is coming eventually, you'll be none the wiser until it seems like the bottom of this movie itself drops out, leaving you, Shiloh, and Becky precariously dangling two-thousand feet in the air on a rickety radio tower with no cell reception, slowly dwindling supplies, and no obvious way to get down other than a quick trip to the great beyond.

The simplicity of Fall is charming compared to the needless complication I've seen elsewhere in other thrillers. This movie is a near-single-location story of an ill-conceived and ill-advised thrill seeker's trip gone horribly wrong, one that leans all the way back on its half-mile-high and horribly rickety setpiece-centric premise. The tower that Becky and Shiloh are climbing is in terrible shape, slowly crumbling like a metal sand castle (sand tower?), and slated for demolition sometime in the near future. Fall puts to great use this hideously devious methodology of holding the inevitability of something going terribly wrong over your head for an unbearably long time, like a patient lion toying with its prey. I've seen a lot of movies, and few have terrified me like the psychotically predacious Fall did.

Unfortunately, with this simplicity comes a premise that only takes Fall so far, a story much too bare-bones to sustain itself. Though this movie is an undeniably hair-raising affair, it can fluctuate weirdly between expected thrills and an occasional, disappointing hollowness. In addition to needing to lose 20 minutes or so of its already short runtime, Fall eventually writes itself into a corner, and I don't like this movie's third-act revelations at all. They're distasteful in a way that only the I guess it was a dream trope can be, and while Fall is really good at putting its characters in dangerous situations, it's not so capable of getting them out. Still, Fall is one of the purest, most undiluted adrenaline rushes I've ever experienced in a movie, and maybe it's unfair to ask emotional and narrative complexity of a movie whose best thrills are chillingly fundamental.

Fall might not be the most complex story ever told. It might have built itself around a premise that doesn't take it as far as it was obviously hoping to go. It may have even written itself into a corner. But when all was said and done, rarely has a movie ever scared me so much. Fall is a 90-minute heart attack, a relentless assault on the senses that takes peril in movies to places it's probably only ever had nightmares about. As a thriller, it thrills in ways only the most intense and suspenseful thrillers can, and who knows? Maybe it'll even save lives. If nothing else, it's sure to make a dent in the number of potential first-time climbers. Thank you, gravity.

Fall - 6/10

James 4: 13-15