the fall movie review 2022

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Scott Mann ’s “Fall” belongs to the trapped horror subgenre of films like “ The Shallows ” and “ Open Water ,” but it takes a dynamic that usually unfolds in the middle of deep water to thousands of feet in the air. Mann and co-writer Jonathan Frank have a clever concept that results in a film that should be avoided by anyone with even the mildest vertigo—I wouldn’t say I’m particularly afraid of heights but there are some scenes that made my stomach turn a bit. You’ve been warned. Sadly, the concept only takes “Fall” so high, and the execution, including some ineffective acting, editing, and other technical choices, makes this a misfire. It doesn’t exactly crash to Earth as much as drift off into the forgettable air of film history.

Becky ( Grace Caroline Currey ), husband Dan ( Mason Gooding ), and Becky’s BFF Hunter ( Virginia Gardner ) are climbing a sheer mountain face in the opening scene when tragedy strikes and Dan plummets to the ground below. A year later, Becky is drowning her grief in a bottle, avoiding Hunter and her worried father James ( Jeffrey Dean Morgan , taking a part so small that it's like a favor to a friend). One day, Insta-star Hunter comes to Becky with a proposal: They’re going to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower that’s basically in the middle of nowhere, from which they will find closure and spread Dan’s ashes. Of course, it goes very wrong, leaving Becky and Hunter stranded on top of the tower with no way down and no way to communicate with anyone who might be able to save them.

Filmed in the Mojave Desert, the vast majority of “Fall” takes place on the tower, and the film admittedly gets some nice adrenaline from the initial climb and disastrous ladder collapse that follows. In fact, there’s a better version of the film that starts right with the climb, allowing the characters’ trauma to arise through their conversations on the way up instead of with a horrendous set-up act that’s filled with clichés and poor filmmaking (it also would have helped reduce the runtime on a 107-minute movie that should be closer to 87). When Becky and Hunter begin their actual ascent, Mann has his firmest grip on the movie, building tension in a way that can be pretty effective.

And then “Fall” stalls again. Hunter is given a secret that's more like melodrama than realism, vultures and drones get involved, and the movie gets increasingly silly through its final act. The best “trapped” films usually rely on realism, making viewers feel like they’re actually trapped in the rocky waves of a film like “Open Water,” and “Fall” crumbles under that analysis. Currey and Gardner give committed performances in physical terms—it looks like an exhausting production—but they’re saddled with juvenile dialogue that doesn’t capture the terror people would really feel in this situation. “Fall” only works if we believe the predicament in which Becky and Hunter are trapped, but the thin dialogue, showy cinematography, and overzealous edits betray the potential of this nightmare.

Ultimately, “Fall” has been designed to be seen on as a big a screen as possible, which is why Lionsgate is going wide with it this weekend instead of shuffling it off to VOD. Much has been written about getting ticket buyers back into theaters with event movies that demand the theatrical experience. It's too bad this effort to help keep the theater industry aloft will only let viewers down.

Now playing in theaters.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Fall (2022)

Rated PG-13 for bloody images, intense peril, and strong language.

107 minutes

Virginia Gardner as Hunter

Grace Caroline Currey as Becky

• Jonathan Frank

Cinematographer

• Robert Hall

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‘Fall’ Review: Things Are Looking Down

In this nerve-shredding thriller, two young women fight to survive while stranded on top of a 2,000-foot TV tower.

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By Lena Wilson

If you, too, are afraid of heights, you’re likely to experience “Fall” as a straightforward horror movie instead of a thriller. The director Scott Mann has certainly packed this latest venture with enough jump scares and bloodshed to blur genre lines. As a result, “Fall” occasionally feels overrun with gimmicks and gotchas, but it also offers one hell of an adrenaline rush.

The film opens on a tragedy. Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and her husband, Dan (Mason Gooding), are scaling a cliff face with their friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner), when an accident sends Dan plummeting to his death. Just shy of a year later, Hunter drags Becky back into the climbing game by promising her an easy half-day jaunt up a 2,000-foot TV tower. The two have been estranged; Hunter spent the last year becoming an influencer while Becky binge drank and contemplated suicide. But when they end up stranded on a small platform at the top of the tower, reconciliation takes a back seat to survival.

“Fall” loses its grip in the final act, as tension gives way to ludicrous horrors. Still, its twists are so bizarre that they’re kind of fun, and the actors sell them hard .

Most of all, this is an impressive feat of cinema. The bulk of the film was shot on a 60-foot platform on top of a mountain, to keep things looking realistic. Of course, that only makes “Fall” all the more harrowing. As Becky and Hunter’s brushes with death compounded, I kept flattening myself into my seat like a literal scaredy cat. Be glad it’s not playing in IMAX.

Fall Rated PG-13 for Ahhhhh!!! Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.

Lena Wilson is a project manager at The New York Times and a freelance writer covering film, TV, technology and lesbian culture. More about Lena Wilson

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‘Fall’ Review: A Don’t-Look-Down Thriller That Will Have You Clutching Your Seat

Two women climb an abandoned TV tower in the desert, and we're with them every shivery step.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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“ Fall ” is a very good “don’t look down” movie. It’s a fun, occasionally cheesy, but mostly ingeniously made thriller about two daredevil climbers, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who decide to scale the B67 TV tower — an abandoned 2,000-foot communication tower that juts up in the middle of the California desert. It’s based on an actual structure (the KXTV/KOVR Tower outside Sacramento), which is used like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the skyscraper that became the pedestal for Tom Cruise’s you-are-there stunt sequences in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.” And if, like me, you loved that movie in part because of how deviously it toyed with your fear of heights, “Fall” is likely to hit you as an irresistible piece of vertigo porn. It’s for anyone who ate up “Ghost Protocol,” as well as the awesome rock-climbing documentaries “Free Solo” and “The Dawn Wall,” and wants to continue that shivery vicarious high.

Critics, for some reason, now like to mock the visual sleight-of-hand that goes into a thriller like this one, as if the CGI involved were all too easy to see through. But in this case I couldn’t disagree more. “Fall” was shot in the Imax format in the Mojave Desert, and there are moments when I honestly don’t know how the director, Scott Mann , the cinematographer, MacGregor, and the two actors did it. Were they actually on a tower — and, if so, how high up? Were there stunt people, or was every bit of this brought off with computer trickery?

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The abandoned TV tower, like the KXTV/KOVR Tower, is, we’re told, the fourth highest structure in the U.S. It has a photogenic vermilion finish (imagine the Golden Gate Bridge as a rusty hypodermic needle), and it turns out to be the perfect setting for a movie about climbing into the sky. As the two women ascend, the desert below looks like something viewed from an airplane. The trick is that the elements of the image are all visually united: tower, horizon, climbers. Without a cut, the film will glide from close-ups to vertically angled drops to death-defying panoramas; the light and shadow are always just right. You know how it feels when you watch an old movie with rear projection that’s laughably fake? “Fall,” by contrast, represents a totally credible and innovative use of CGI. Watching the movie, we believe our eyes and, therefore, our raised pulses.

The two women have agreed to make this climb as a way to wrest Becky out of her funk. In the film’s opening sequence, we see the two ascending a vertical rock face along with Becky’s husband, Dan (Mason Gooding), who winds up plunging to his death. A year passes, and Becky can’t let go — of him, or of the anxiety that has calcified around the tragedy. Facing her fear, scaling that TV tower along with her best friend (they plan to scatter Dan’s ashes when they get to the top), is the only thing that will purge the demon.

As terrifyingly tall as the tower is, it doesn’t strike us as something that would offer that much of a challenge to highly experienced climbers. There’s a ladder on the inside of the caged needle that goes up for 1,800 feet. For the remaining 200 feet, the ladder is outside the structure. I wouldn’t want to climb 30 feet of it, but these two aren’t scared of heights, and the feat they’ve laid out for themselves looks a hell of a lot easier than shimmying over the smooth plunging rock faces they’re used to. That’s why they succeed pretty quickly. Half an hour into the movie, they’ve ascended to the small circular platform up top.

But along the way the whole structure has been quivering, with telltale shots of a nut or a bolt coming undone here and there. It’s the outside ladder that’s getting loose, and as they take the last steps, a chunk of it falls out from under them, the weight of that chunk pulling the rest of the ladder down with it. Just like that, they’re stranded. The cylindrical pole that’s left is too smooth to climb down. The rope they have isn’t long enough. And though they’ve got their phones, they’re up too high to get service. There is nothing up there but the two of them and their do-or-die ingenuity.

At the start of the movie, Hunter is all giddy enthusiasm, like a Reese Witherspoon go-getter from the ’90s, and Becky, lost in her malaise, is all po-faced misery and dread. But the two actors show you how these women come alive, and connect, by climbing. It’s through their expressive skill that we believe in what we’re seeing. “Fall” was made for just $3 million, and it’s good enough to remind me of another perilous small-scale thriller centered on two people doing all they can to survive: “Open Water,” the scary 2003 indie that basically extended the opening sequence of “Jaws” over 80 minutes. Movies like these come with built-in narrative devices — like, for instance, the soap-opera revelation that comes up between Becky and Hunter. There are moments when the script overdoes the millennial effrontery, especially when it’s focused on Hunter’s identity as a YouTuber who wants to document the whole climb for her 60,000 followers (“This bad boy is over 2,000 feet tall, and your homegirls are going to be climbing to the tippy tippy top!”).

Mostly, though, we’re with these two, living through every vulture attack and sudden drop that involves something like hanging from a rope and trying to grab a stranded backpack. Is there a pedestrian below who could save them? The movie deals with that possibility in a way that recalls the Robert Redford-stranded-at-sea movie “All Is Lost.” “Fall” is a technical feat of a thriller, yet it’s not without a human center. It earns your clenched gut and your white knuckles.

Reviewed online, Aug. 9, 2022. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 107 MIN.

• Production: A Lionsgate release of a Tea Shop Production, Capstone Studios, Grindstone Entertainment Group production, in association with Flawless, Cousin Jones. Producers: David Haring, James Harris, Mark Lane, Scott Mann, Christian Mercuri. Executive producer: Roman Viaris, Barry Brooker, John Long, Dan Asma.
• Crew: Director: Scott Mann. Screenplay: Jonathan Frank, Scott Mann. Camera: MacGregor. Editor: Robert Hall. Music: Tim Despic.
• With: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mason Gooding.

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Review: Two women alone on a platform 2,000 feet in the air? ‘Fall’ somehow makes it work

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One of cinema’s great wonders is the way a few moving pictures on a flat screen — composed and choreographed just so — can make a viewer’s palms sweat and heart race. Just look at “Fall,” a survival thriller that at times feels like an extended experiment in audience-poking, testing how many times director Scott Mann can induce a state of mild panic by repeatedly showing the same image. That image? Two young women standing on a small metal platform, perched 2,000 feet above the ground, attached to a narrow tower with no ladder.

“Fall” stars Grace Caroline Currey as Becky, a skilled mountain climber still reeling a year after witnessing the accidental death of her husband during an ascent. Virginia Gardner plays her best friend, Hunter, a social media influencer and daredevil who tries to shake Becky out of her torpor by inviting her along as she shimmies up an abandoned communications tower in the desert. On the way up, the ladies do have a ladder — rusty and shaky. But while they’re triumphantly taking selfies at the top, the way back down collapses.

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Mann and his co-writer, Jonathan Frank, follow a lot of the formulas for these kinds of movies, for better and for worse. On the downside, they pad out their story with Becky’s personal trauma, making her unresolved feelings about her husband’s death a bigger part of the plot than they need to be.

On the upside, “Fall” does what the best survival movies do, by carefully enumerating the resources the heroes have at their disposal so that we can enjoy watching them figure out how to deploy these pieces wisely — or wince as they waste chances. At the moment when the ladder crashes, Becky and Hunter have no cell service, and the backpack with their water is stuck on a dish about 20 feet below them. But they do have a drone camera, a flare gun, two phones and climbing gear. How can they use what they have to get help, while avoiding the circling vultures and whipping winds?

A similar question could be asked of the filmmakers: Can they do enough with this tiny amount of material to fill a whole movie? Well … sort of. Mann and Frank throw in some unexpected twists and obstacles; but while this film is quite long, it still feels like it’s missing one or two more story beats, either early or late. The space occupied by Becky’s heartbreak could’ve been filled with something more viscerally gripping.

That said: Oh jeez, that tower is so tall, and that platform so small, and those women look like they’re barely hanging on. For the most part, “Fall” works because it plucks on the same raw nerve, over and over. How many times can Mann freak out the audience by cutting to a vertiginous shot of the unfolding crisis? Every time. Sometimes cinema is simple.

'Fall'

Rating: PG-13, for bloody images, intense peril and strong language Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes Playing: In general release Aug. 12

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‘Fall’ Film Review: Heights-Driven Thriller Successfully Maintains Its Grip

This suspended-suspenser plays to audience acrophobia

Like a provisions-packed knapsack, a good deal of emotional backstory gets shoved into the first half-hour of “Fall” before it traps two female climbers 2,000 feet above the ground in a remote stretch of desert for the rest of its running time.

Will that friendship be tested? Of course. But the true signal that co-writer (with Jonathan Frank) and director Scott Mann has his thrill-hungry audience’s needs in mind is that before adventuring besties Becky and Hunter can even get to the base of the TV tower they intend to scale, they lock eyes with a carcass-gnawing vulture, who gets a righteously gnarly, ominous close-up.

In other words, you’re in good talons with “Fall,” a better-than-average B-movie corker that’s almost like a corrective these days to the behemoths that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on mayhem only to bludgeon us with exhilaration-free, numbingly digitized peril. If you long for the sweaty-palmed giggling inspired by Harold Lloyd hanging off a high-rise’s clockface or Tom Cruise on the harness-necessitating side of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, you will likely fall for “Fall.”

Cruise’s “Mission Impossible” character Ethan Hunt even gets a shout-out in Mann’s and co-screenwriter Jonathan Frank’s screenplay, invoked as an adrenaline god by daredevil vlogger Hunter (Virginia Gardner, “Runaways”), on a mission to snap her pal Becky (Grace Caroline Currey, “Shazam!”) out of a yearlong bereavement following the death of Becky’s husband Dan (Mason Gooding).

The movie’s “Free Solo”–esque prologue, set on a sheer mountain face, depicts that ill-fated climbing accident, witnessed by the two women. Twelve months later, Becky has curled inward into the drinking, crying, suicidal life of a shut-in, ignoring the emotional pleas of her worried dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), until bouncy, sassy Hunter shows up at her door with her version of a self-help scheme: Secretly ascending a disused TV tower for the one-year anniversary of Dan’s death, Becky will then be able to get past her grief, while Hunter, armed with a drone and a selfie stick, gets to create a lot of sexy-dangerous YouTube content.

The screenplay is chockful of platitudes about facing death, living life, confronting fear, moving on, letting go, blah blah blah, but that dialogue matters less than whether Currey and Gardner are a believable Gen-Z team of self-gratification junkies looking like they’re having fun doing something crazily reckless. From that angle, the duo’s energetic performances suffice, carrying an authentically warm and teasing camaraderie into the California desert, past that No Trespassing sign, up hundreds of rusted rungs, and onto a tiny circular platform that threatens to become the site of Becky’s and Hunter’s last selfie when the tower’s uppermost ladder separates from its loose bolts and strands them.

Mann’s previous hackwork in the grizzled-male action genre (“The Heist,” “Final Score”) won’t prepare you for how dedicated he is to avoiding scared-damsel vibes and centering instead the pair’s fearlessness and smarts. (Panic isn’t absent, mind you, just saved for when appropriate.) “Fall” can then focus on maximizing its one-location two-hander, toggling between what’s outlandishly fun about enduring this particular hazard (which is based on a real TV tower, one of the highest structures in the US) and what’s believably clever in the details of how Becky and Hunter try to save themselves.

On the characterization front, things can get clunky — one revelation is eye-rollingly predictable, and a third-act twist feels cribbed from a lot of unreliable-narrator movies. But viscerally the movie delivers — the site-specific peril is suitably unnerving when the stuntwork, effects, and cinematographer MacGregor’s more height-intensified shots are in synch, and the rescue hacks these tech-savvy women devise from their available items (phones, binoculars, shoes, drone, selfie stick, tower light, push-up bra) are enjoyably crafty enough to earn the movie’s one self-satisfied bit of dialogue: “That’s some MacGyver shit.”

And don’t forget those feathered harbingers of doom. This may be the first movie to apply the Chekhov’s gun rule to vultures, a portent sure to satisfy the more horror-minded ticket buyers, not to mention anyone else eager for the kind of back-to-basics survival excitement “Fall” refreshingly serves up in this dreary age of apocalyptic popcorn emptiness.

“Fall” opens in US theaters August 12.

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A Movie So Ideal for the End of Summer That It’s Actually Called Fall

August has always been a wasteland, the Sunday night of months, when the weather is at its sticky worst and everybody who has the ability to fuck off to someplace more pleasant has already done so. If you don’t have the means, there’s the cheaper sanctuary of the cineplex, with its welcoming darkness and arctic air-conditioning — except that after a summer in which theatrical releases mounted a rousing comeback , the studios neglected to schedule any big movies for this period in which we most need something dumb and fun. Fortunately, there’s a not-that-big movie that fits the bill of being silly and simple enough to fill a lazy afternoon without demanding anything strenuous from its audience at all. That movie is Fall , in which two young women climb up to the top of a remote TV tower for the sake of closure — and also content — and then get stuck up there.

Fall is part of that grand cinematic tradition in which attractive actors get trapped somewhere dangerous and have to struggle to save themselves, hopefully for at least the 80 minutes required for an acceptable feature-length. Recent-ish participants include Ryan Reynolds, who in a lull in his career back in 2010 spent the entirety of Buried in a wooden coffin; his spouse Blake Lively, who was trapped on a rock in the ocean by a persistent shark in the improbably good in 2016’s The Shallows ; and Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore, and Kevin Zegers, who got marooned on a ski lift suspended over some convenient wolves in 2010’s Frozen . Like those movies, what Fall offers is a double layer of tension. Will Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) figure out a way to make it off a 2,000-foot TV tower unscathed? And will writer-director Scott Mann figure out a way to draw out the suspense for long enough when there are only so many things that can happen on top of a 2,000-foot TV tower and one of them is in the title?

Does it really matter? I’m tired. Tapped out. I have no means for a vacation at the moment and nothing else left to give to this season, and Fall asks for so little that it feels like too much to demand something as basic as logic or characters in return. See, Becky’s husband Dan (Mason Gooding) died during a rock-climbing excursion the two of them were taking with Hunter, and a year later, Becky’s still mourning — you can tell by the fact that she drinks alone at bars. Then Hunter, her internet-famous bestie, shows up with a proposal that will help Becky get her mojo back: They’re going to climb the decommissioned B67 TV tower out in the California desert. Becky is a sad brunette and Hunter is a fun blonde, and that’s about all there is to the two, despite a brief gesture toward an extreme-sports frenemies dynamic right out of The Descent . Braving the height looks like the bigger challenge at first — there’s a ladder up the side of the tower, so it doesn’t require Spider-Man-like free-climbing skills. But then the ladder, rusted and neglected, sheers off, leaving the two women trapped on a narrow platform high above the earth.

There’s blistering sun, and an attempt to get help with a flare gun, and when things get really desperate, some marauding vultures. Mann and his crew built a version of the tower close to a cliff to give his shots a real sense of dizzying height and a more tangible sense of danger. An incredibly weak twist pays off with a hilariously gruesome, triumphant finale. But what really makes Becky and Hunter’s little saga so seasonally appropriate is that it feels like a consolation for those of us feeling a little stuck ourselves. These two daring, adventure-seeking women head off for what’s supposed to be a fun getaway that tests their limits and restores their sense of self, and what happens? They get stranded, sunburnt and dehydrated, unable to get a phone signal or anyone’s attention as scavengers try to eat them. Sure, the vertiginous shots up the side of the tower are stomach-turning, but what’s really satisfying is the message that sometimes it’s better just to stay home. It’s Fall , get it? Summer is over. 

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Screen Rant

Fall review: an unexciting entry in the survival thriller genre.

Fall will be torturous for anyone afraid of heights but could otherwise be a bit of a bore for someone looking for thrills that go beyond that.  

Like spinning a wheel labeled with people's greatest fears and landing on acrophobia, the latest entry in the thriller subgenre of single-location, anxiety-inducing situations is Fall , a movie that will be torturous for anyone afraid of heights but could otherwise be a bit of a bore for someone looking for thrills that go beyond that. Movies like Fall don't require much character work, nor do they need much plot beyond the situation at the center of the film and Fall is no overachiever. With predictable twists and one grating character, the Lionsgate movie tries to do something different from others like it, but it can't quite reach the heights that its main characters aren't (and should be) afraid of.

Fall follows Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) who, when the movie opens, are climbing a rock face with Becky's husband Dan (Mason Gooding). When Dan tragically falls to his death, Becky is sent into a tailspin of grief, giving up her favorite pastimes of free-climbing and pole-dancing to wallow alone at the bar. Soon enough, Hunter shows up with a proposition to climb a 2,000-foot tall radio tower. Mainly, it's so she can film a drone video of Becky hanging from the ledge for her 60,000 followers. When Becky and Hunter reach the top of the out-of-commission tower, the ladder falls, and they are stuck nearly half a mile above the desert with no cell service, no water, and no way down.

Related: Prey Review: Predator Franchise Is Revived In Efficient & Violent Thriller

As far as survival thrillers go, Fall follows the playbook established by films like 47 Meters Down or Crawl . As Becky and Hunter look out at the desert surrounding them, Fall offers plenty of visuals that are rendered well enough, with the desert surrounding them becoming even more deadly 2,000 feet above the ground. With limited space to move, it adds a new dimension to claustrophobic thrillers, one that makes the sky just as scary as the endless ocean in survival thrillers like Open Water .

Unfortunately, it doesn't add much to the genre itself. One twist that's supposed to land with an emotional punch is telegraphed early on and in a way that will make what's coming quite obvious to keen viewers. Another twist, while not as obvious, doesn't land as well as it's supposed to. Fall's nearly two-hour runtime also makes the circumstances feel drawn out when thrillers like these are better served with brisk runtimes that don't allow for much thought in between their obligatory plot points.

As Becky and Hunter's circumstances become increasingly dire, their efforts at rescue become almost laughable. That's the problem with Fall's setup. There's not much they can do except watch from 2,000 feet in the air as their attempts fail. There's no way for them to climb down and no way for them to call for help. They must rely on hair-brained attempts at contacting those on the ground and when those fail, there's not much left. While their attempts at rescue are funny, nothing is as funny as the film's incorporation of Becky's pole-dancing skills or its use of the song "Cherry Pie" by Warrant in one nail-biting sequence.

Gardner and Currey do what they can with the material, but both Gooding and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (as Becky's father) are criminally underused, a fault of the film's setup more than anything else. Sure, the film adds a new perspective to the survival thriller genre, but it relies so heavily on the idea that heights are scary (even if its protagonists don't think so) that there's not much left beyond that by the end of the film. When Fall concludes, it commits a cardinal sin of the genre that may have audiences scratching their heads.

Fall releases in theaters on August 12. The film is 107 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for bloody images, intense peril, and strong language.

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Fall – Movie Review (3/5)

Posted by Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard | Aug 11, 2022 | 4 minutes

FALL is a new thriller that is part survival and part fear-of-heights terror. It works surprisingly well, and can even handle the fairly long runtime. In other words, do check it out. Read our full Fall movie review here!

FALL is a new fear-of-heights thriller that is every bit as much a subgenre as “shark horror” is. I mean, just think about how many people suffer from fear of heights. Also, for most people, it’s a fear they’re confronted with quite often. Not many people, who fear sharks, ever have to be near them.

I wasn’t sure that this movie could handle a runtime of 1 hour and 47 minutes. In my mind, this should be around the 90-minute mark. However, yet again, I had to just pack away my own ideas about what “should be”. This movie has enough to last as long as it does.

Continue reading our  Fall  movie review below. The film is out in theaters from August 12, 2022.

Simple concept, perfectly executed

The story that turned into  Fall  was actually conceived as a short film. Fortunately, it turned out that there was enough there to create a feature film.

Inspired by movies such as Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (where the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai is scaled) and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin’s Oscar®-winning documentary Free Solo , they went to work. Especially that last one is easy to see in the opening scene.

The result: Best friends Becky ( Grace Caroline Currey ) and Hunter ( Virginia Gardner ) climb 2,000 feet to the top of a remote, abandoned radio tower. After reaching the platform and getting ready to get back down, pieces of the tower collapse and they find themselves stranded with no way down.

For a few moments, I did fear that some relationship drama would take up space. However, it was just a small part of the movie. Also, while some elements along the way might annoy you, just hang in there until the complete story has been told.

No green screen, just pure terror

To keep it real and get all the best shots, the filmmakers decided to actually shoot this on a platform out in the real world. Sure, some movie magic is included (they’re not the full 2,000 feet in the air with no safety net). But no green screen was used for Fall .

Of course, this also meant that the casting included making sure that the two stars could handle heights. Fortunately, both Grace Caroline Currey (Becky) and Virginia Gardner (Hunter) could work with heights. Both work remarkably well in this movie!

In the only other two roles that actually matter, we see Jeffrey Dean Morgan ( The Unholy ) as Becky’s father, while Mason Gooding ( Scream 5 ) plays her husband.

Insanely sweaty palms

While I am not crazy about heights, I don’t really have a fear of heights. I know as much because my Heaven of Horror co-founder, Nadja, does have a fear of heights. As a result, her palms (and even her feet) started sweating profusely… and that was from just watching the trailer !

Watching the entire  Fall  movie was like an actual workout. Within the 107-minute runtime, there is probably at least a good 90 minutes of full-on terror for anyone uncomfortable with heights.

While I was experiencing increased heart rate and thought it was very fascinating (and yes, out of my comfort zone), she was sweating and squirming. So much that her Fitbit complimented her on the fact that she was getting a solid workout.

What I’m trying to say is simply that watching this survival movie will probably feel like an actual survival experience if you have a fear of heights.

Consider yourself warned!

And also,  go for it , it’s a great way to explore just how bad your fear of heights is.

Watch Fall  in theaters – if you dare!

Scott Mann is the director of  Fall  with the screenplay written by him and Jonathan Frank ( Mara ). Scott Mann previously directed the movies The Tournament  (2009) and Heist  (2015) . Currently, the two have a new survival movie in pre-production.

The title is  Tsunami LA  which probably tells you all you need to know!

To double down on having people attached who knew how to create survival terror, producer James Harris is also onboard. He produced the movie 47 Meters Down which deals with both the fear of sharks as well as claustrophobia and fear of drowning.

With Fall , the filmmakers have stated that they “wanted it to be the ultimate fear of heights movie” and they might just have succeeded. The simplicity of this concept is executed so well that it gets under your skin as the story (and survival element of the story) evolves!

Fall  is out in theaters from August 12, 2022.

Director:  Scott Mann Writers: Scott Mann, Jonathan Frank Cast: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding, Jeffrey Dean Morgan

  For best friends Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), life is all about conquering fears and pushing limits. But after they climb 2,000 feet to the top of a remote, abandoned radio tower, they find themselves stranded with no way down. Now Becky and Hunter’s expert climbing skills will be put to the ultimate test as they desperately fight to survive the elements, a lack of supplies, and vertigo-inducing heights in this adrenaline-fueled thriller costarring Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

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About The Author

Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard

I write reviews and recaps on Heaven of Horror. And yes, it does happen that I find myself screaming, when watching a good horror movie. I love psychological horror, survival horror and kick-ass women. Also, I have a huge soft spot for a good horror-comedy. Oh yeah, and I absolutely HATE when animals are harmed in movies, so I will immediately think less of any movie, where animals are harmed for entertainment (even if the animals are just really good actors). Fortunately, horror doesn't use this nearly as much as comedy. And people assume horror lovers are the messed up ones. Go figure!

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Fall Review

02 Sep 2022

You can almost imagine the ’70s B-movie disaster-movie-poster tagline for Fall : something along the lines of “2,000 feet of TV tower terror!” This is an enjoyably throwback breed of thriller, a movie only interested in making your palms leak sweat and your adrenal glands go into overdrive. In those modest goals, it is entirely successful.

It’s a ruthlessly efficient genre exercise. Characters and their respective motives are established quickly and unfussily: Hunter (Virginia Gardner, in a fearlessly fun turn) is a thrill-seeking YouTuber chasing clout by clambering up the fictional tower; her best pal Becky (Grace Caroline Currey, the emotional anchor and audience surrogate for the “nope!” moments) is a grieving widower hoping to conquer her climbing fears. Both are seeking closure after tragedy hit 12 months earlier, in a Mission: Impossible 2 -style opening sequence (a comparison openly embraced when one character calls another “Ethan Hunt”).

So, against all available better judgement, the pair of friends agree to make the climb up the “fourth-tallest structure in the United States”, and within 20 minutes of elapsed runtime they're ascending the ladder. Soon enough, the rusty steel cables start rattling, and so do your nerves, leaving us under no illusions as to what kind of film this is. Essentially it’s a series of problems being solved under extreme conditions (How do we find a phone signal? How do we drink water? How do we wee?); setbacks piling up and minor victories being achieved. While that means it follows a fairly familiar route, there’s room for at least one major surprise.

Scott Mann’s direction and MacGregor’s vertiginous cinematography do a decent job of making a boringly functional structure look cinematic and exciting.

But it hardly matters if the plot is somewhat formulaic because the experience is so brilliantly executed; so richly, stupidly, edge-of-your-seat exciting. Scott Mann’s direction and MacGregor’s vertiginous cinematography do a decent job of making a boringly functional structure look cinematic and exciting; when a character looks down at one point, the camera whips down too. There are CGI and green screens, inevitably, but the location photography in California’s Shadow Mountains makes full use of natural light and big skies, totally selling the danger.

It’s silly. Of course it’s silly. You don’t need a science degree to know that multiple laws of physics are being defied. There are terrible decisions being made roughly every ten or 15 minutes (“It feels solid,” one character says of a ladder that looks anything but). There is dialogue about personal drama that feels like it could probably wait until after they’ve sorted all the life-or-death stuff first. It doesn’t matter: Fall aims to thrill, and succeeds with flying, vertigo-inducing colours.

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Fall review – suffer from vertigo? Look away now

Two friends in search of adventure get stuck on top of a TV tower in the desert in this sweat-fest of a suspense thriller

E ven if you don’t suffer from vertigo, there are moments in Scott Mann’s thriller Fall – the single-handed selfie snapped while dangling from a rusty grating 2,000 feet in the sky, for example – that are almost unwatchable. But for those of us who are such babies about heights that we need to steel ourselves just to climb the ladder to the loft, this is the kind of button-pushing ordeal of a movie that makes your eyeballs sweat with anxiety.

The story is simple: two female friends in search of adventure and streaming clicks climb to the top of the disused B67 TV tower in the Mojave desert, but then find themselves stuck, with no phone reception and a pair of feisty vultures eyeing them with obvious interest. The trip is framed as a catharsis; a means for Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), recently widowed after a climbing accident, to confront and conquer her fears. But frankly, those fears – of scaling a shuddering structure that is groaning with metal fatigue and ominous rattling rivets – seem perfectly reasonable and healthy.

Mann is clearly having a lot of fun backing up the visual triggers (shots of slipping fingertips clinging to rungs) with a rich aural palette of tortured iron creaks and cracks. Even so, and even with a nicely macabre third-act twist, there is quite a lot of running time to fill with two young women stranded in the sky. But while the pace falters a little – there are only so many ways you can almost fall off a tower, after all – the tension is unrelenting.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Drama , Thriller

Content Caution

In Theaters

• August 12, 2022
• Grace Caroline Currey as Becky; Virginia Gardner as Shiloh Hunter; Mason Gooding as Dan; Jefferey Dean Morgan as Dad

Home Release Date

• September 27, 2022

Distributor

Movie review.

Becky is completely and desperately stranded in her pit of despair.

Her beloved husband, Dan, died while out on a rock-climbing jaunt. Despite all the proper precautions taken, his equipment failed, and he fell like a helpless stone from a very high mountain wall. Becky was right there, climbing beside him. And she saw it all.

Now all these (what is it?) weeks (months?) later, she wanders hopelessly with little to guide her. The postage-covered cardboard box that holds Dan’s ashes still sits on the entryway counter where Becky dropped it. It silently watches as she leaves for the local bar and then staggers back home to get another drink, pop another pill.

Her dad is trying to get her to snap out of her funk and start life again. But all Becky can see is dark clouds. All she can feel is pain. And all she can say to her father is … well, hurtful, nasty things. He once spoke harshly of Dan, you see. And Becky’s current cup of misery spills over so easily these days.

Just before Becky fatally drowns in that cup, however, she gets a call from her BFF Shiloh Hunter. Hunter was a great friend to both Becky and Dan. And if anything, she was the best climber of all three of them. And so even though Becky doesn’t want to be “saved”—for this surely is another ploy orchestrated by her Dad—she opens the door and lets her girlfriend in.

Hunter has plans. Yes, she admits that Becky’s father called her. But she would have been there soon in any case had she known how bad off Becky was. In Hunter’s opinion, the only way Becky will ever pull herself up by her own carabiner is to face her fear straight on. Hunter knows exactly what to do: They’re going to climb.

In fact, they’re going to climb up the B-67 TV tower. Haven’t heard of it? That’s no surprise. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and it’s been defunct and abandoned for years now. But this skinny tower of iron and steel stretches some 2,000 feet straight up. It was once the tallest structure in the United States—so high that it needs a constant blinking red beacon on top to ward off low-flying aircraft.

And this, this will be Becky’s salvation. Together they’ll climb to a small platform at its peak and Becky will scatter Dan’s ashes. Like Dan used to say, “If you’re scared of dying, don’t be afraid of living.” That’s exactly what they’ll do, ‘cause there’s no living that compares to hanging off a small platform by one hand 2,000 feet in the air.

Of course, anyone who takes even a little time to think about a long-abandoned TV tower might wonder, Uh , wait, doesn’t iron and steel rust? And their answer would be, sure enough. Ladders, railings, rungs and supports do indeed rust. And old, rusty bolts rattle and wobble loose.

Becky and Hunter are indeed climbing together, hoping Becky will climb out of her pit of despair. But what they’ll find at the peak of tower B-67 is another question altogether.

Positive Elements

Becky and Hunter are good friends who both are willing to give their all for the other. Hunter repeatedly encourages her friend that she is much stronger than she gives herself credit for being. During their time together we learn of some points of strain in their relationship. But the two apologize and forgive.

Dan, on the other hand, is revealed to be less than what Becky always thought he was. In fact, her father’s harsh words about Dan—for which Becky had pushed him out of her life—turn out to be pretty accurate. Dad tries nonetheless to help his struggling daughter at every turn. Eventually, Becky and her father have a moment of healing and forgiveness, too.

Bravery and self-sacrifice abound here. Hunter and the film make it clear that people should live their lives to the fullest. (Though those statements could be misinterpreted as a license to take foolish risks. And on that front, there are some rather foolish choices made here.)

Spiritual Elements

Sexual content.

Becky and Hunter both wear tank-tops that reveal some skin. Moreover, Hunter has a social media channel that she’s recording herself for, so she wears a push-up bra to emphasize her attributes and takes a number of pictures and videos with that feature in mind. (The movie’s camera watches closely, too.) “T—s for clicks,” she proclaims. Later, though, she removes that bra to use it for something else. (She removes it while still under her top.)

We find out that Dan had an affair with someone.

Violent Content

Things get pretty violent and bloody in this PG-13 film. We see one person fall from a great height, but don’t see that person impact the ground. On the other hand, we do see one dead body that’s bloody, ripped and torn and then being eaten by vultures. Someone stuffs a large object into a wound on this corpse. The camera also examines a small animal that’s still alive with its organs hanging out. Vultures swoop in and begin eating this creature, too.

The birds swoop in an attempt to knock an injured person off a tower pole. One of the women also sustains a large cut on her leg that the vultures go after. However, one of those birds is grabbed, has its brains bashed out and is eaten in turn.

People dangle from heights in precarious ways in high winds. They swing on ropes and slam into the metal side and crossbeams of the tower. The tower falls apart under the weight of people climbing on it. They’re cut, injured from falls, and have their flesh torn from rope burns. Someone is almost hit by a speeding truck. Becky has a dream of waking in bed covered in blood. People feel the effects of having no food or water.

Crude or Profane Language

There are at least two f-words (perhaps more) in the tensest moments, along with more than 30 s-words. Joining those are several uses each of the words “d–n,” “b–ch,” “a–hole” and “h—.”

God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a total of 17 times (God being combined with “d–n” on three of those). Crude reference to male genitalia are uttered.

Drug and Alcohol Content

After her husband dies, Becky hits the liquor bottle hard. We see her staggering drunk in a bar and then going home to reach for another drink to wash down a prescription drug of some sort. In fact, it appears she’s about to take a handful of the pills before a call from Hunter stops her.

Other Negative Elements

We see one of the women urinating off the side of the tower platform (seen from a long distance away). Someone falls over and vomits. Two guys steal a vehicle instead of offering rescue to people in need.

Fall is a tense but spare film. After all, how much can you do when your characters are trapped 2,000 feet in the air on a 4-foot-wide platform?

That location and those story limitations certainly intensify the film’s acrobatic dangling, especially when you layer in up-close rusted breakage and acrophobia-inducing camera angles. But those constraints also tend to hold a magnifying glass up to this pic’s kinda rusty and formulaic seams. At times it almost feels like someone pasted a What If? or a And Then sticker on the various sky-high scenes.

That aside, though, the bigger problem for family audiences comes in the form of Falls constant flow of profane and foul language, along with some gore and booziness. Those bits cause this fingertip hanging flick to slip and they make it far less suitable for an exciting climb into your local theater seat.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Fall Ending Explained (In Detail)

• The ending of the 2022 movie Fall movie leaves some questions unanswered and has ambiguous deeper meanings, adding to the intensity and suspense of the story.
• By the ending of Fall it's revealed that Becky is hallucinating, and that Hunter is dead for most of the movie — after her fall, she does not catch the backpack and climb back up.
• The tower in Fall is based on a real tower in the California desert and was specifically constructed for the film, creating a desolate backdrop that reflects the characters' isolation and loss of hope.

The Fall movie ending provides a nail-biting climax to an intense, high-altitude story of survival that leaves some questions unanswered and some deeper meanings ambiguous. Fall revolves around a grieving mountain climber named Becky whose husband Dan fell to his death. A year later, her friend Hunter proposes climbing to the top of a decommissioned 2,000-foot TV tower to scatter his ashes, and Becky agrees in the hope that it will help her to move on. However, they ironically end up fighting for their own lives when they’re stranded at the top with dwindling hope of survival.

While it earned an admirable $21 million at the box office (via The Numbers ), Fall didn’t really take off until it arrived on streaming a few months later. Fall was a surprise hit on the small screen, pulling in so many viewers that a Fall sequel has been confirmed . The way the Fall movie ending brings its story to a conclusion with Becky taking charge and figuring out a way to save herself is a satisfying end to a vertigo-inducing ride — however, it's the shocking twist that ensured Fall became so widely discussed.

Fall is available to stream on Starz

Fall True Story & Real-Life Inspiration Revealed

How long is becky trapped on the tower, becky is stranded 2000ft above the ground for around a week in fall.

While Fall doesn’t provide an exact timeframe for Becky’s ordeal on the TV tower, it’s pretty easy to work out. She’s on the tower for long enough to become delirious from hunger and dehydration. After the drone is destroyed and Becky loses hope of being saved, it takes her a few days of no food and water to finally realize Hunter is dead.

The day after Becky realizes that Hunter didn't survive, Becky is attacked by a vulture that she kills and eats to regain some of her strength. By the time Becky is saved by emergency services in the Fall movie ending, she’s spent around a week on the tower.

What Does Hunter's Tattoo Mean?

The 1-4-3 tattoo in fall reveals that dan had cheated on becky with hunter.

During their first night on the tower, after Hunter’s car is stolen, Becky notices a tattoo on Hunter’s ankle that ends up revealing a four-month affair that Hunter had with Dan before Becky married him. The tattoo features the numeric phrase, “1-4-3.” Becky instantly connects these numbers to Dan because he used to use “1-4-3” to tell Becky he loved her.

Hunter reveals that she and Dan had been having a secret affair behind Becky's back.

Since “1-4-3” was Dan’s obscure way of telling Becky he loved her, Becky immediately deduces that he must’ve used the same line on Hunter to warrant the tattoo. Hunter reveals that she and Dan had been having a secret affair behind Becky's back. This is why Hunter volunteers to retrieve the backpack — it's partially to try and make amends. Unfortunately, Becky cannot bring herself to forgive Hunter, and the 1-4-3 tattoo causes a rift between the two friends that is never resolved, as Hunter dies before the Fall movie ending.

5 Reasons Fall 2 Can't Be A Direct Sequel

Is the tower from fall real, the tower becky and hunter climb is fictional, but based on a real structure.

Fall isn’t based on a true story, but the 2,000-foot TV tower that Becky and Hunter get stuck on is based on a real tower in the California desert. It has a fictitious name and purpose in the film, but the filmmakers were inspired by the real-life KXTV/KOVR radio tower (via Digital Spy ). Also known as the Sacramento Joint Venture Tower, this broadcast tower can be found in Walnut Grove next to a Doppler weather radar station. Standing at 2,049 feet tall, KXTV/KOVR tower is the tallest structure in California.

The tower seen in the film was constructed specifically for the production at the top of a mountain to create the illusion that the actors were at a higher altitude than they actually were

The tower seen in the Fall was constructed specifically for the production at the top of a mountain to create the illusion that the actors were at a higher altitude than they actually were (via Radio Times ). But the shooting took place in California, the same state where the real tower is located. This location was crucial to creating the vertigo-inducing visuals of Fall . The California desert provided a desolate wasteland as the backdrop to symbolically reflect Becky and Hunter’s isolation and their gradual loss of hope as rescue seems more and more unlikely.

Why Did The Campers Not Help Becky And Hunter?

The campers symbolize that nature isn't the only danger.

When Becky and Hunter realize they’re stranded at the top of the tower with no chance of escape, one of the first things they find is a flare gun. Since they only have one flare, they only have one chance of alerting potential rescuers to their presence, so they don’t want to use it until they know someone will definitely see it. On the first night, they hope some campers in the desert will spot them. Just as the campers are getting ready to call it a night, Becky and Hunter shoot the flare into the sky.

Becky and Hunter face threats from gravity, harsh weather, and birds of prey — but other human beings can be just as cruel and uncaring.

The flare catches the campers’ attention as intended, but they don’t save Becky and Hunter. When the campers see the flare and realize the owners of the nearby vehicle are trapped on the tower, they see it as an opportunity to steal their car. This spirit-crushing scene in Fall highlights that other people can be as much of an obstacle to survival as dangerous circumstances. Becky and Hunter face threats from gravity, harsh weather, and birds of prey — but other human beings can be just as cruel and uncaring.

Fall: 10 Movies That Used Their Locations As Plot Devices

Why didn't becky realize hunter was dead, becky was suffering from psychological shock.

The biggest twist in Fall reveals that Hunter was dead throughout the latter portion of the thriller movie . After she climbs down to retrieve her backpack, Becky manages to pull both Hunter and the backpack back to the top of the tower. The pair then try to charge the drone, so they can send it to get help. However, when the twist is revealed, it emerges that Hunter never made it back to the top of the tower. After the botched attempt to retrieve the backpack. Hunter becomes a sort of mouthpiece for Becky’s conscience and inner monologue.

There are some hints that Hunter isn’t really there.

Aside from the improbability that Hunter could survive the fall and climb back up, there are some hints that Hunter isn’t really there. When Becky drops the backpack, Hunter makes no attempt to catch it. After a couple of days, Becky realizes Hunter isn’t alive. When she fell from the tower, she hit a communication dish and bled to death.

Becky didn’t notice Hunter had died in Fall because she was so weak and feverish from lack of food and water that she hallucinated her friend was still alive.

Becky didn’t notice Hunter had died in Fall because she was so weak and feverish from lack of food and water that she hallucinated her friend was still alive. The hallucination was a psychological result of Becky’s denial about being left stranded at the top of the tower all by herself . Imagining a dead character is still alive as a coping mechanism is a common trope in survival stories — it can also be seen in Adrift and Gravity .

What Happens After Becky Is Rescued?

The ending of fall doesn't reveal much about becky's fate once she makes it down from the tower.

What happens to Becky after she’s saved in the Fall movie ending will likely be explored in the sequel. She will either resume her daredevil lifestyle with a new lease on life after fighting so long for survival or double down on her fear of danger and close herself off. If Fall 2 is a direct sequel, then it will follow on from the Fall movie ending and detail where Becky’s life goes after surviving her ordeal on the TV tower.

If it’s not a direct sequel, then the franchise could become a sort of anthology series introducing new characters stuck in unenviable high-altitude situations like the one seen in Fall .

8 Recently Announced Movie Sequels We're Shocked Are Actually Happening

The true meaning of fall's movie ending, the climax of the fall movie is about having perspective.

The real meaning of the Fall movie ending is that life shouldn’t be taken for granted. In the blink of an eye, anyone can find themselves in a deadly situation with the odds stacked against them. The ending of Fall is bittersweet because Becky survives, but Hunter doesn’t.

This near-death experience puts everything into perspective and makes Becky’s differences with her dad seem petty and insignificant

After spending so many months mourning the loss of Dan, coming so close to death and losing another loved one reminds Becky to keep fighting and embrace life. This near-death experience puts everything into perspective and makes Becky’s differences with her dad seem petty and insignificant, leading to a heartfelt reunion between the two.

What Was Real & What Was Hallucinated?

Nothing about the ending of fall is guaranteed to be real.

The biggest thing that played out in the twist at the Fall movie ending was that Becky was on her own for much of the time. She never realized that Hunter had died, and she hallucinated the entire discussions and planning with her friend. Hunter's death happened after she fell to the platform below and bled out. This means that almost everything Becky saw in the second half of the movie was fake, a hallucination that started when she began to realize there was no hope.

It is possible that the vulture Becky killed was simply another figment of her imagination

Since Hunter and Dan had an affair, Becky was angry, and she manifested that in her entire anger and spite toward her friend — all within the hallucination. There was also the moment prior to the Fall movie ending where a vulture attacked her and Becky killed it. This was one of two vultures that was feeding on Hunter's dead body, and she shooed the other vulture away and finally climbed down and sent out the SOS message for help.

However, with the other hallucinations, it is possible that the vulture Becky killed was simply another figment of her imagination, making one wonder if Becky ever did make it down, or if the conclusion of Fall was another ending like The Descent .

Director Scott Mann

Writers Jonathan Frank, Scott Mann

Cast Grace Caroline Currey, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mason Gooding, Virginia Gardner

Rating PG-13

Runtime 107 minutes

Genres Thriller

Fall (2022) Movie Review & Ending Explained: Did Becky actually survive?

Single-location movies have a practical purpose: executing a story without worrying much about budgetary constraints. And as the proclivities of humanity have shown, the more the limitation, the more the abundance of creativity. However, the lack of acknowledgment of the fundamental flaw in the premise sometimes stops a movie from becoming great. Notwithstanding, sometimes, a movie’s sole purpose is to entertain, either by eliciting a palpable sense of horror or a nail-biting sense of tension. Scott Mann’s latest film, “Fall (2022),” falls more on the latter side of the category.

It is easy to lampoon “Fall” as “47 Meters Up”, as it is being bankrolled by the producers of “47 Meters Down”, itself a cult classic and a fantastic companion as a double feature. Both of these films follow two close female friends who must work together to get out of an unsolvable jam when the extreme sporting event they are a part of inevitably goes wrong. While “47 meters down” finds these women submerged in a cage in shark-infested waters, “Fall” finds them stuck 2000 feet up on top of a radio tower. But we are getting too ahead of ourselves.

Fall (2022) Movie Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis

Why does becky agree to climb the tower.

The movie opens with best friends Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), with Becky’s husband, Sam, rock climbing. While manipulating a particularly tricky opening, Dan is startled by a bat flying out of the crevice he was holding on to, disturbing him and losing his foothold. As Dan hangs in the air, his body connected to his harness, he tries to swing back but falls to his death. Fifty-three weeks later (one year for those counting), Becky’s life is a mess.

Swallowed in grief, resigned to alcohol, and distanced herself from her father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) because her father did not trust Dan to be good enough for her, she tried to commit suicide until Hunter visited her. Hunter tries to console her and suggests that Becky accompany her in climbing a 2000-foot TV tower situated in the desert. It would serve a dual purpose of both spreading Dan’s ashes once they climb to the top and providing a cathartic experience for Becky to gain closure on her loss and fear.

Hunter, the adrenaline junkie, has now become an Instagram influencer. The climbing of the tower is the latest in a long line of crazy stunts she executes to attract fame and satiate the adrenaline junkie within her. As they drive towards the tower, they stop at a restaurant for dinner, where Hunter teaches her to charge her phone by connecting her charger to the leads of the lamp and using that as a power outlet. The girls drive towards the tower the next day but cannot pass the gate. Thus, they start walking toward the tower, where they come across a pack of vultures picking up a half-dead coyote.

As they shoo the vultures away, Hunter shoots a picture of the dead coyote. The girls soon reach the foot of the tower, where they start climbing the internal ladder. Becky almost backs out due to nerves, but Hunter convinces her to keep going. There are shots signifying how rickety the entire structure of the tower is and how the screws connecting the ladders and holding them upright are precariously close to unscrewing themselves due to the pressure being exerted on the steps.

How do the two women get trapped at the top of the tower?

The girls reach the end of the internal ladder, which leads to a platform. From there, they must climb another 200 feet until they reach the top of the tower. As Becky and Hunter climb up the ladder, unbeknownst to them, one of the bolts comes loose. The girls finally make it to the top of the tower, where they manage to spread Dan’s ashes. An emotional moment that hit both Becky and Hunter hard. They also take pictures of them hanging in precarious positions with the help of Hunter’s 4K camera drone.

Finally, they decide to start climbing back down, but as Becky starts to climb, the unscrewed part of the ladder comes loose, causing the entire ladder to topple and fall to the ground. It also causes Becky to drop the bag containing their drone and water bottle on top of one of the satellite dishes attached below. Hunter manages to pull Becky up using the harness. It presumably causes a large gash on her knee, which Hunter helps her to stop bleeding by making a tourniquet. They also found a flare gun and binoculars in the compartment at the base of the tower.

Stuck at the top of the tower, Becky and Hunter cannot find a signal, thus rendering their smartphones effectively useless. After waiting for five hours and realizing that no one had heard the ladder crash and no one was coming to help them, the two tried to search for help via their binoculars and saw a trailer parked up near the gate. They planned to lower the phone a couple of feet so that the phone could regain signal, which would send an already prewritten message via Hunter’s Instagram.

How do the girls try to communicate?

They finally decide to drop the phone by putting it in one of Hunter’s shoes and reinforcing the shoe by padding it with Hunter’s sports bra-the logic being that the phone would regain the signal while falling and send the signal. However, the phone breaks, and even a dog belonging to one of the trailer park men sniff the shoe and finds the phone but doesn’t look up at the tower. The girls finally wait until dark before launching the flare from the flare gun and attracting their attention. Unfortunately, instead of driving the trailer to help them drive up to the gate, the men stole the car they had parked there.

Becky and Hunter start getting hungry and dehydrated. As charged emotions flare up, Becky watches a video of her and Dan’s wedding and notices Hunter’s gloomy face in the video. With the tattoo emblazoned on Hunter’s ankle (“1 4 3”), this compound forces Becky to confront Hunter by revealing to her that Dan had trouble proclaiming he loved her, choosing to say those three numbers instead. Hunter admits to having had an affair with Dan for four months, initiated by Dan after a drunken encounter. It forced Hunter to distance herself from Becky after Dan’s death because she had broken off the affair with Dan as she valued her friendship with Becky far more.

The following day, having ruefully acknowledged that the phone is broken and no one is coming, Hunter decides to climb down to the satellite dish and try to retrieve the bag containing the water and the drone. Using the harness, she lowers herself to the top of the satellite dish and manages to jump to the other dish and retrieve the bag. Hunter uses the selfie stick to reach the harness and manages to reach up. As she starts climbing up, Becky pulling her from the top, she appears to slip and fall to the dish. Becky, terrified, manages to peek down and sees her still alive, albeit her hands are profusely injured. But Becky manages to pull her up.

Do the girls manage to get the drone working?

Becky then tries to deliver a piece of paper using the drone to the motel where they had stayed the night before, but the battery starts running out, which forces them to retrieve the drone. Remembering Hunter’s trick of charging the phone via the lamp leads, Becky climbs up to the port where the tower’s night light is attached. Her wounded leg is already starting to smell, but she manages to climb up the pole with considerable effort, unscrew the light, and connect the drone’s charger with the leads and her marriage ring as a conduit. As the drone charges slowly, Becky holds on for dear life throughout the night, barely dodging the vultures smelling blood from her wounded leg.

Finally, after the drone is charged, the girls attach the piece of paper to the drone and fly it over the gate towards the motel. But, as fate would have it, and as a callback to a previous scene in the first act, a truck crashes into the drone and destroys it, shattering her hopes of ever sending a message. Becky soon starts to lose herself from delirium and dehydration, almost falling from the platform. She finally asks Hunter for her other shoe, so she can drop her phone and ask for help. But Hunter coolly replies that she doesn’t have the shoes because she isn’t here in the first place.

Fall (2022) Movie Ending, Explained:

What happened to hunter.

It is then revealed that she died when Hunter slipped and fell into the dish. Becky had only managed to pull up the bag. The “Hunter” who had been helping Becky throughout the rest of the events up to this point had been a figment of her imagination. It does make sense, as the “Hunter” who had been at Becky’s side after climbing back up to the platform had been more cautious, trying to provide Becky with moral support by talking about wrestling—a hobby which only Becky enjoys—or how Hunter convinced Becky to climb up the tower to connect the drone’s charger, to make Becky manage to survive.

Also, Read: ‘Fall’ Sequel to Double Down on Vertigo-inducing Thrills

Did becky actually survive.

One of the vultures flies down the following day and rests on the platform. Inching closer to Becky’s leg, it starts to nibble at the flesh. Waiting for that moment, Becky manages to capture that vulture by the throat and bash it, killing it. After eating it to regain strength, Becky finally manages to connect herself to the harness and pull herself down to the dish, where Hunter’s dead body lies half mangled by the impact of the Fall. The vultures tear apart her stomach exposing it further. The vulture nibbling Hunter’s flesh looks up at Becky’s bloodstained face and flies away, realizing there is another hunter. Becky, weeping with grief and whispering that she loves her, types a message to her father, inserts the phone inside Hunter’s shoe, stuffs the shoe in Hunter’s exposed stomach, and then pushes off the satellite.

In the next scene, we see Becky’s father, James, driving toward the tower and reaching the base to see police cars and paramedics already present. His heart sinks when she sees a dead body being carted off by the paramedics, but, he finally sees Becky, and the movie ends with their tearful reunion.

Fall (2022) Movie Review

From the standpoint of the premise itself, Fall is a flawed movie because it inherently exposes how underwritten and cliched the characters are. To undergo closure, the two protagonists decide to climb a 2000-foot tower, which is already rickety and falling apart. But what makes Fall so effortlessly engaging is Scott Mann’s direction, especially during the moments where he records the characters climbing and keenly focuses on the bent steps, the loose screws of the ladder, or the moments of physical prowess exhibited by the two protagonists.

It manages to make Fall reveal itself as a movie not having enough depth from an emotional perspective (the pedestrian dialogue doesn’t particularly help matters). Still, as a movie capable of eliciting tension and forcing you to have clammy hands due to Mann’s choosing to deploy wide shots and drone shots to evoke the feeling of standing atop a structure of great height, Fall does its job.

This movie proves Scott Mann’s expertise as a technically proficient and sound director, and Fall is one of those rare and engaging mid-budget movies. The visceral excitement and tension smooth over the dodgy CGI at specific segments. The performances, especially by Grace Caroline Currey as Becky, make you believe in her character arc, even if the writing doesn’t.

Read More: The Festival of Troubadours (2022): Review & Ending Explained

Fall (2022) Movie Links – IMDb , Rotten Tomatoes Fall (2022) Movie Cast – Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding

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A cinephile who is slowly and steadily exploring the horizons of the literature of films and pop culture. Loves reading books and comics. He loves listening to podcasts while obsessing about the continuity in comics.

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The Fall Guy

A down-and-out stuntman must find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend's blockbuster film. A down-and-out stuntman must find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend's blockbuster film. A down-and-out stuntman must find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend's blockbuster film.

• David Leitch
• Drew Pearce
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• Ryan Gosling
• Emily Blunt
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• 9 User reviews
• 42 Critic reviews
• 77 Metascore
• 1 nomination

• Colt Seavers

• Jody Moreno

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• Trivia Ryan Gosling had a chance encounter with Steven Spielberg , who told him he loved this movie. Gosling said, "As far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter anymore what happens. Steven Spielberg liked it. That was an all time moment for me. I'm really excited for people to see it. I think it's a really special movie."

[from trailer]

Colt Seavers : [after a fight; talking to Jody] I had no choice. I had to do some Jason Bourne shit!

• Crazy credits During the closing credits the left side of the screen is dedicated to stunts done for the movie. And then an additional scene, that includes cameos.
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: The BEST and Weirdest Movies you (mostly) Haven't Seen Yet | Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

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• Mar 14, 2024
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• May 3, 2024 (United States)
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The Fall Guy review: "A snappy, sharp, sexy screwball action romance"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

A snappy, sharp, sexy screwball romance, with sparking chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, great support from Hannah Waddingham and ace action.

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

Those who saw Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s skit at the 2024 Academy Awards, introducing a tribute to the stunt community, will surely have had their appetites whetted for The Fall Guy. A contemporary reboot of the 1980s TV series, in which Lee Majors played a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter, this buzzy action comedy fizzes largely thanks to the easy-on-the-eye chemistry that Gosling and Blunt showed on Oscar night. On this evidence, they could – and should – form an ongoing double act.

Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a successful stunt performer who is having a bit of a thing with camera operator Jody Moreno (Blunt). For the past six years, he’s been the double for A-list star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but things go disastrously wrong during a calamitous daredevil 100ft plunge. Rushed to hospital with a broken back, Colt is out of the game. When the movie cuts to 18 months later, he’s eking out a living as a valet at a Mexican restaurant.

Out of the blue, he’s contacted by producer Gail Meyer (Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham), who requires his services in Sydney, Australia, on the set of new sci-fi Metalstorm, which stars Ryder. When Colt arrives, he’s shocked to discover that Jody is calling the shots as director, and she is less than pleased to see him. For the past year and a half, Colt had ghosted Jody, struggling to cope with his injuries and his feelings for her. Needless to say, their reunion is on a rocky road.

The plot’s motor really starts to spin when it appears that Ryder has gone missing and Colt is sent to track him down, with help from stunt coordinator Dan Tucker (Winston Duke) and the actor’s personal assistant, Alma Milan (Stephanie Hsu). When Colt starts to play detective, the twists come thick and fast, as bodies pile up and it transpires that our hero may be ‘the fall guy’ in more ways than one.

The search for Ryder keeps the plot ticking over, but it really plays second fiddle to the two leads trading barbs and steamy looks as the craziness of a full-scale Hollywood production goes on around them. Boasting the tagline ‘It’s high noon at the edge of the universe’, Metalstorm looks like the sort of franchise nonsense studio executives greenlight in their sleep – just one of the good-natured ribbings the film industry endures in a screenplay by Drew Pearce ( Iron Man 3 ).

While there isn’t a lot of in-depth probing of Seavers – as character studies go, the film operates on a superficial level – The Fall Guy is never less than bags of fun. Some of the best scenes come as Blunt and a high-Kenergy Gosling occupy each other’s orbit, like the sequence where Jody repeatedly demands Colt perform a stunt where he’s set on fire and yanked into a rock while she yells out her grievances through a megaphone.

The Gos and Blunt aren’t the only perfect match, meanwhile, with the movie directed by former stuntman David Leitch ( Atomic Blonde ). The filmmaker brings his skill set to all the action sequences, particularly a superb speedboat chase through Sydney Harbour, but he also sharpens the penchant for comedy he showed with Deadpool 2 . On this evidence, he deserves to fully break out of the action-director mold.

He is, of course, aided by a fine support cast. Waddingham, with a mass of dark curls, is very funny as the bullish producer, while Taylor- Johnson has a riot as the a-hole A-lister, coming on like a sort of über-Matthew McConaughey. Duke (Us, Black Panther ) is also very watchable, making Tucker more than just a sidekick as he accompanies Colt on his adrenaline-fuelled adventures.

Admittedly, the connection to the original TV show is tenuous at best. Let’s face it, The Fall Guy is only likely to be remembered by those over 50, and even then it’s hardly a show like The A-Team or The Dukes of Hazzard to get the nostalgia juices flowing. You’re left with the feeling that the film could have been made under another title, with no brand recognition, and be no less successful. Still, that’s Hollywood for you; at least the result emerges as a fine tribute to the unsung heroes of the movie business.

It’s also a tad too long, with the final act stretching the conceit a bit too far (although the climactic sequence and the footage that accompanies the end credits are worth the protracted running time). But beyond these minor gripes, The Fall Guy is an effervescent comedy that truly flies. Finally, those stunning stuntmen have a film to call their own.

The Fall Guy is released in UK cinemas on May 2 and in US theaters on May 3.  For more, check out our list of the best action movies of all time.

James Mottram is a freelance film journalist, author of books that dive deep into films like Die Hard and Tenet, and a regular guest on the Total Film podcast. You'll find his writings on GamesRadar+ and Total Film, and in newspapers and magazines from across the world like The Times, The Independent, The i, Metro, The National, Marie Claire, and MindFood. 

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‘the fall guy’ and ‘kingdom of the planet of the apes’ launch 2024 summer movie season.

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Next week brings the start of May and the launch of the 2024 summer movie season, with The Fall Guy on tap May 3 and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes May 10. The first weekend of May is typically staked out by the biggest Marvel Studios IP or another top-tier blockbuster franchise, but this year, all bets are off.

Kevin Durand stars in "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes"

As I discussed before, 2024’s first quarter is enjoying relatively good numbers due overperformances by Dune: Part Two , Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire , and Kung Fu Panda 4 . This gave the first quarter a nice boost ahead of what’s expected to be another rough year at the box office.

‘Fall Guy’ For Summer Gals?

The next opportunity for a new blockbuster performance arrives the weekend after next, when The Fall Guy drops into theaters. Trailers have done an excellent job setting the stage for a strong debut, and Ryan Gosling’s star is shining brightly after his performance in last summer’s billion dollar blockbuster hit Barbie .

The Fall Guy will probably land somewhere around $40 million domestically on its freshman weekend, but has a shot at overperforming if word of mouth — and crucially, interest among women and girls, whom I think will show up in bigger numbers than expected — is solid enough.

While at first glance this appears to be an action-packed “guy” film, I believe it has great potential to be a breakout hit loved by men and women alike. I don’t remotely expect Barbie numbers, but don’t be surprised if The Fall Guy beats estimates with high numbers and low drops.

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Sh gun episode 10 review a powerful finale but not what i was expecting, the trump media stock price djt is about to adjust down by 22 7.

Still, remember that pre-pandemic we’d be seeing $85-100 million openings for the first two weeks of May and the summer movie season overall.

‘Kingdom’ Comes

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes arrives May 10th with hopes of reviving the franchise to its former box office glory. I expect Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to dominate the start of summer movie season with a North American opening in the range of $50-60 million. However, like The Fall Guy , we’re talking about numbers significantly lower than the glory days of Marvel superheroes and other franchise titans consistently delivering $100-200 million weekends.

That said, the titles expected to shoulder the burden this year are hardly on par with such previous top-tier performers. So if The Fall Guy can’t play at the same level as a Top Gun sequel or an Avengers movie, it’s forgiven.

Likewise, Planet of the Apes is a big franchise, but it’s also one that typically played in the mid-tier blockbuster range, reaching its $710 million pinnacle with 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes . That film also saw the series’ biggest opening weekend at $72 million stateside. So this is a legacy sequel that’s consistently popular but not always — rarely, in fact — a top-tier performer, and it’s in fact the sort of legacy sequel that we’ve seen fail repeatedly over the past several pandemic years.

Meaning a $55 million start might be a welcome outcome regardless of how it sounds in the context of traditional May theatrical performances. And Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes still hopes to do perhaps $100 million in its internationally bow, which would give it a nice $150 million (plus or minus) opening.

With a respectably modest budget in the neighborhood of $125 million and a smart marketing campaign so far, Kingdom’s bar for success is relatively low here, and I expect it to have a nice $400-500 million run — that’s sight unseen, so my predictions might change as we get closer to release and I review the film.

A New Way Forward

One way to view this situation is to consider that theatrical is still lagging due to a combination of factors, including the pandemic, home entertainment’s rising primacy (converging with pandemic lockdowns), audience fatigue with certain trends (including superheroes, nostalgic legacy sequels, shared-universe attempts), perceived decline in quality in certain series and genres, and economic factors.

In that context, then, and minus the certainty usual afforded by big branded IP capable of delivering the sort of summer season kick-offs we’ve grown accustomed to, we could instead look at Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and The Fall Guy as sort of a second-tier and a third-tier franchise teaming up to deliver top-tier franchise box office numbers.

If both perform at the high end of potential, they might hypothetically generate $100 million in combined opening domestic receipts, and $1 billion total combined box office. All of that on modest budgets that combine toward the investments a top-tier expensive franchise sequel would demand.

Again, admittedly an effort to make some sense of it all in the ongoing theatrical environment. But it’s also possible that thinking about film releases and pairing or alternating them to adapt to continued problems with distribution and theatrical models is a good strategy. It spreads risks around while deploying solid franchise performers and freeing up funds to experiment with projects that otherwise get ignored when big-budget top-tier blockbusters suck up all of the funding.

This isn’t a long-term answer to the problems plaguing theatrical, of course. But it’s a plan that can help mitigate the damage while forcing studios to come up with better approaches, get budgets under control, and rely on a more diverse mix of genres and storytelling going forward.

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