Fall

The culture which has grown up around online celebrities doing daring or even downright dangerous things for attention has been a gift to filmmakers. No clumsy machinations, no strenuous twists of plot are now required to get two young women to the top of a rickety iron radio tower which is supposedly one of the tallest structures in America. Now they can be set in position post-haste, so there is little delay in getting to the meat of the plot. In this case that is, as you will likely have guessed, the question of how to get safely down again.

In case it feels unreasonable to ask that you sympathise with someone who has got herself into such a predicament, Scott Mann’s thriller adds a complicating factor. Only Hunter (Virginia Gardner) is there for the clicks. Becky (Grace Caroline Currey – the darker haired, more plainly dressed one, in keeping with genre tradition) has been persuaded to join her for the sake of her mental health. Like Brittany Ashworth’s character in The Ledge (also out this year), she has recently lost the man she loved in a climbing accident, and her confidence has been badly damaged in the process. Her dad tells her that he’s really worried by her retreat from the active life she used to love; Hunter tells her to get back on the horse that threw her; and there you go.

It’s through a combination of Hunter’s happy-go-lucky egotism and Becky’s dismissal of her instinctive wariness as paranoia that the two women find themselves in a position which, to viewers treated to shots of crumbling bolts and trembling girders, never looked remotely like a good idea. A few Short Round-style antics later and the ladder which carried them up the final ascent has snapped right off and fallen to the ground. Now they have only a small platform to cling to. Something is blocking their phone signals (this shouldn’t happen on a radio tower, but it’s pretty much the film’s only serious challenge to physics as we know it, so bear with it), they have no supplies and the vultures are (literally) beginning to circle. What’s more, they ignored that all-important childhood advice and totally failed to tell a responsible adult where they were going and what time they would be back.

This kind of scenario is a treat for a good writer and death for a bad one. Jonathan Frank, working together with Mann, has done a decent job, and the actors have sufficient skill to make it work. There’s an incident about halfway through which is disturbing in its cynicism and reinforcement of stereotypes – one keeps waiting for it to evolve into something clever, but it never does – but in terms of structure, dialogue and – crucially – pacing – the film works well. Mann proves adept at handling the action scenes so that even though there’s little here by way of surprise, it’s still exciting to watch each time the women face fresh dangers.

Films like this need to shift gears at least once in order to give their characters a meaningful emotional arc, and Fall achieves this by having Becky succumb to delirium at one point, assuming an almost Gothic quality as she is tormented by her fear of vultures, with the implication that she may have made an enemy of one by trying to drive it away from the dying animal it was dining on down at ground level. The enormous size of the birds and the ease with which they move through an environment where the women definitely do not belong seems to take us back in time, these descendants of dinosaurs mocking the small, ill-equipped mammals who have overreached themselves in their attempt to defy the natural order of things.

Not everything here quite gels. The source of the women’s quarrel, carefully saved for a cathartic moment as they face death from thirst or exposure, is predictable and twee. Their tendency to stress their frustration through repeated use of the word ‘freaking’ may be a regional issue but makes it feel as though the writers prioritised realism less than making their film about extreme physical suffering and the prospect of a horrific death ‘safe’ for children. A scene in which Hunter needs some cloth so slips her bra off underneath her top rather than removing the top instead feels like a step forward for this sort of fare, only for Becky to strip down to her underwear close to the end.

As usual in such films, there are better solutions available than the ones the women employ, but that’s less important than keeping it believable and within the bounds of the characters’ abilities. Fall just about pulls this off, and it will give most viewers the thrill they’re looking for.