Movie Review: 'The Free Fall'

Content warning, this review mentions suicide and discusses a character attempting to take their own life. If depictions of suicide are a trigger for you, please either read with caution or click away from this review. I don’t recommend the movie The Free Fall which is far from a sensitive depiction of suicide, among many, many other failing elements.

The Free Fall stars Andrea Londo as Sara, a young woman deeply traumatized by witnessing her mother murdering her father. So traumatized by the event was Sara that she almost immediately went from the bedroom where the murder suicide occurred before her eyes to the bathroom where Sara slipped into a bath and attempted to take her own life by cutting her wrists. Sara is saved by the arrival of her husband Nick (Shawn Ashmore).

It’s unclear how much time has passed since the murder-suicide-suicide attempt but we can suspect that Sara may have been in a coma for some time before awakening with little to no memory of what happened. She doesn’t even remember her husband, Nick, or recognize his highly dubious decision to have her convalesce in the same home where her mother brutally murdered her father and where she attempted to take her own life. Somehow, in fact, this will never be commented upon by anyone in the movie.

Sara has suffered memory loss but it’s not complete memory loss. Each night, when she goes to bed, brief flashes of the trauma that sent her mind into retreat, come forward and give her little pieces of her memory back. Moreover, some of her memory fragments feel as if they are not memories but actual events that are happening in front of her but she can’t awaken long enough to see if they are real. These include visits from her sister, Julie (Elizabeth Cappuccino), a concerned doctor, Dr Sims (Dominic Hoffman), and a charismatic bearded man she doesn’t recognize.

This man begins calling for Sara even during her waking hours and much to the distress of Nick who tries to control who can see and speak with Sara. Sara is basically a prisoner to Nick and their housekeeper, an openly hostile woman named Rose (Jane Badler). Rose provides a convenient scapegoat for Nick whenever Sara begins to question his controlling nature, he comes up with something to blame Rose for and she in turn intimidates Sara for seeming to tell on her.

And on we go as Nick becomes more malevolent and controlling, Sara’s mind rebels against his control and Rose puts Sara back into her place until things begin to spiral into a form of madness that may or may not be intentional. The Free Fall is a chaotic movie of muddled plot and ambiguous characters. The movie is clumsy and tips its hand regarding Nick very early on and yet director Adam Stillwell directs the movie as if what is being revealed is intended to be surprising.

Sadly, nothing surprising ever arrives. Instead of surprises we get bloody gore and viscera, brief allusions to cannibalism and demonic possession. All of this is intended to distract you from how predictable it all is as the film builds to an obvious conclusion with no suspense, thrills, or scares. What is intended to be shocking plays either as unintentionally funny or merely desperate.

The aesthetic of The Free Fall doesn’t help matters. The film wants to be an Ari Aster style shocker but it looks like Aster’s Hereditary on the budget and talent of a subpar Lifetime movie. It’s as if the filmmakers were trying to make a grand guignol horror movie but had never seen one before so they just winged it and The Free Fall was the result of their half baked notion of what shocking horror might look like.

Acting is hard and I respect actors far too much to offer much criticism. All I will say about the acting in The Free Fall is that the director did not do his actors any favors. Whoever told Shawn Ashmore to play his character as pure evil from beginning to end owes him an apology. And, whoever told Andrea Londo that it was a good idea for her to barely squeak out every line of dialogue as if she were being strangled by unseen hands throughout the entire movie, did her a great disservice as well. Londo might also have a word for the costume designer who seemed to purposefully choose unflattering, ill-fitting nightgowns as her character aesthetic.

The Free Fall is a complete misfire. It’s a borderline laugh riot of unintended comedy. The film narrowly avoids being a complete embarrassment but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about this second rate schlock horror flick. Never mind how offensively the film employs an attempted suicide for shock visuals. The film repeatedly uses the same footage of a tastefully lit, nude, Sara crawling across a bathroom floor with her wrists cut as a shock visual. It’s used so often that you become numb to it, numb to the exploitative quality of it. Your left only with a residual resentment over a bad movie that uses suicide as an ugly visual and unnecessary plot point.

The Free Fall debuts in limited release and for On-Demand rental on January 14th, 2022.