Movie Review: 'Fall' Made Me Afraid of Heights

Well, it’s official, I am afraid of heights. Watching the new movie Fall, the story of two extreme climbers going to the top of the tallest TV tower in Texas, confirmed something I had kind of already known about myself. I’d had a minor panic attack while at the top of the former Sears Tower in Chicago about 10 years ago and I am pretty sure it came from just looking out of a window at the vastness of the City of Chicago and quickly growing dizzy.

The movie Fall confirms the diagnosis. Watching this movie I nearly passed out on two occasions and had to stop watching for a few minutes after one particularly harrowing look down from the top of the tower. Say what you will about some aspects of Fall, once the movie arrives at the top of the television tower in the midst of a vast desert, the terror is no joke. Fall is a movie you watch through your fingers and yell at in your mind as you root for the characters to take tighter grips and not lean over the edge so much.

Fall opens on a terrifying note. Our main character, Becky (Grace Fulton), is mountain climbing with her new husband, Dead Meat, errr, I mean Mason (Mason Gooding). While they are taking all precautions they can, Becky’s best friend, Hunter (Virginia Gardner) is free climbing without safety cables like some kind of maniac. Nevertheless, despite the precautions, it’s Becky and Mason who find trouble. As Mason looks to lock in their next safety cable, he’s shocked by bats emerging from a small cave.

Losing his grip, Mason plunges and briefly catches on the safety cable. However, he can’t reach the rock wall and Becky, not being strong enough to save him, is forced to watch him fall to his death. Cut to one year later and Becky is a disaster. Her apartment is a biohazard filled with empty plates and emptier liquor bottles. And Becky is ghosting her loving father, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who only wants to help her. There is a complex dynamic between father and daughter at play, one that will play out once we get to the meat of the story.

The meat of the story is a ridiculously dangerous climbing stunt. After disappearing following Mason’s funeral, Hunter kept right on climbing and doing crazy stunts. Now, she’s returned for Becky because her next crazy climb requires a little help. Hunter has found the location of the fourth tallest place in America, a television tower in a dusty desert in Texas. The tower is long out of use and poorly maintained but Hunter only sees that as a good thing. Hunter has gotten internet famous for her climbing stunts and this one could be huge for her YouTube following.

Naturally, you already know that Becky agrees. You likely also already know how the climb goes. Fall is about the two reaching the top and battling not to fall off. As directed by Scott Mann, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jonathan Frank, Fall may have a lot of exposition but it is worth it for what happens at the top of the tower. Mann and Frank have come up with some terrific challenges for our protagonists and that is all that I will say about what happens in this movie.

As much as I am biased by my newfound fear of heights, I loved Fall. This movie is crazy exciting. The aerial photography and whatever trickery was used to make it appear as if these two characters were at the top of the world, worked me over. I was exhausted by the end of the movie. I was gasping for air during the movie. The visuals and the sound design of creaking and scraping metal are relentless as the movie goes on. The score is rather perfunctory for a horror thriller but several moments of the overblown score really does ratchet up an already supremely tense movie.

The elements of melodrama and expository dialogue in Fall may not be all that memorable but they are enough to get us to that tower and to those extreme visuals. And really, what more can we ask of Fall than that. The movie delivers exactly the thrills that the marketing campaign promises. These two young actors are terrific in their physically terrified performances and that single location on top of the tower is the thing of nightmares. I love it.

Fall brought back terrific memories of the deeply underrated 2003 shark horror movie, Open Water. Both are films about people trapped in extreme situations they may not escape from and both create breathtaking tension from their impossibly small and yet intimidatingly vast locations. Each taps primal fears about life and death survival and they’d make one stomach churning double feature for the bravest of brave souls.

Fall opens in theaters nationwide on August 12th, 2022.

Find my archive of more than 20 years of movie reviews online at SeanattheMovies.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter @SeanattheMovies for the archive and my regular feed, @PodcastSean. You can hear me talk about movies on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast each week on your favorite Podcast platform.