Fall

Gravity and Other Inconveniences

There's a particular kind of physical dread some movies go for, the kind that makes your stomach hop into your throat. I got that sensation several times watching *Fall*, Scott Mann’s 2022 survival thriller. The premise is almost brutally simple. Two friends, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), decide to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower in the Mojave Desert. They ascend. The ladder snaps. They’re stuck, hundreds of feet in the open air.



Mann isn’t trying to invent a new kind of trapped-movie wheel. He’s working solidly in the same vein as *Open Water* or *127 Hours*—only the threat here is the vast, frightening void of the sky instead of an ocean or canyon. What makes it visually striking is that relentless verticality. Mann and crew didn’t just toss the actors into a green screen storm. They built a tower top on the edge of a real mountain to simulate that impossible drop. The wind whipping through the actors’ hair? That’s real, too. The result is so tactile, so sweat-inducing, it tricks you into feeling the height.

I’m wary of gimmicky films, but there’s one stretch around the halfway mark that really lands. When the rusted ladder finally gives way, the camera swoops and dips, mirroring the vertigo you feel in your gut. Currey doesn’t just scream—her body locks up. Her knuckles go white around the remaining pole. You can see the fatigue in her shoulders, maybe because the actors reportedly did their own stunts in brutal heat. After seeing her in polished, larger-than-life roles like *Shazam!*, watching her stripped down to raw panic is surprisingly effective.



But the trouble starts when the film leans on a dramatic backstory to stretch out the runtime. Becky is still grieving her husband (Mason Gooding), who died in a climbing accident a year earlier. Hunter exists to chase clout as an adrenaline-junkie influencer. The dialogue between them often feels manufactured. As a RogerEbert.com reviewer put it, *Fall* falls apart when you test it against the realism that makes the best trapped films work. When the women are forced to unload a soapy, melodramatic secret while perched on a platform the size of a pizza box, the tension drains out.



Still, I can’t fully dismiss what Mann pulls off. Whether that’s admirable or annoying depends on how much B-movie logic you can tolerate. The ending tries for a psychological hook that I’m not 100% convinced about, but it doesn’t shy away from it. *Fall* isn’t a deep dive into trauma, no matter how much it tries to iron out that tale. But as a piece of filmmaking that makes an audience grip their armrests and remember that humans weren’t built for long stays in the sky? It largely succeeds.