Sky High Fear: A Review on Fall

We live in a world where cars drive themselves, where robots are promoted over human beings, and where I can access my phone with my face and fingerprint. So, with all this technology how on earth is it so difficult for a society to simply type a barely declarative sentence and press send? If this is you, don’t worry. At least you didn’t climb a crazy tall and rusty, also did I mention abandoned, radio tower in the middle of nowhere without telling anyone, right? Quick disclaimer: this is the basic, exciting and tad bit frustrating synopsis of the 2022 thriller sensation Fall, the newest creation from writer and director Scott Mann.

Fall can be compared to drifting off to sleep, your breathing calms and relaxation floods through you when... BAM – You fall and wake up now sweating and puffing. The film presents Becky Connor (Grace Caroline Currey), a newly made widow by the fault of a climbing accident. She is left in despair, stuck in her phases of grief and proceeds to do a good job pushing everyone away, especially her father, James Connor (Jefferey Dean Morgan), who never liked her husband, Dan (Mason Gooding), to begin with. Stuck in her life and lulling herself along with alcohol, Becky is then approached by her best friend, Shiloh Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who starts the main plot as she manages to convince Becky to climb the abandoned 2000-foot-tall B67-radiotower in the hope of overcoming her fears. But when they get stuck at the top, with little supplies and suffering vertigo-inducing heights, Becky and Hunter’s climbing skills are put to the ultimate test. The plan was to bring Becky closure, but that will only be a good deal if she makes it out alive.

Despite the frustration that makes one want to start pacing idiotically around the room, I found the relationship between the soundtrack composed by Tim Despic and directorial decisions of Scott Mann to be impressive, as they contribute to the suspense.

Despic’s score is what I would call a piece done in the highest of flattery to his peers, much like plagiarism. With a soft piano melody riddled throughout, the score shares an uncanny similarity with a vast section of Andrew Lockington’s score in the action blockbuster, San Andreas. The film even has a connection to the riffs and the techniques of tension building in Cliff Martinez’s score of Game Night, which although has, unlike Fall, an abundance of bubbly personality does share similar bones. Despite similarities, I do believe that Despic’s creation does use the equally successful techniques enjoyed by his peers to add a speculative sense to the score and what I would also refer to as an expectant and uncertain piece of music, which is effective for Fall. But it is this combined with the sheer imagery of height that really brings the sweat to the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands.

In creating this film, Mann was very hands on in revolutionising his cinematography with a small $3 million budget. Mann was against using a green screen for Fall, because the lighting and wind could never be recreated. So naturally, like anyone with a busy life, he went driving around the middle of nowhere and found a hill with a slightly smaller (but still rusted mind you) radio tower on top, and decided to make both his lead actors hang from it as they circled a drone around them. After all a 600-foot-tall tower is so much smaller than a 2000-foot-tall tower that it’s not even scary anymore, right?

However, my frustration comes in with Mann’s writing of the script alongside co-writer Jonathan Frank, as the effort which goes into making the tower look realistic feels short-lived as the film comes to an abrupt end without a sense of closure. And without the six-month later snippet it would have been more useful for me to have borrowed a choose-your-own-adventure from the children’s section of the library. Nevertheless, Mann’s persistence in making a real and tangible image throughout his film is impressive in a day and age where technology is the be all and end all.

What was also impressive in Fall was the makeup work led by Erin Blinn, who took the time to really alter the appearance of both girls as they grew haggard and exhausted over their journey. To achieve this, she has really taken the time to show the sheer dryness of being wind-burnt and sun-burnt. This ability to create decorated and realistic wounds is a skill, which over Blinn’s career has supported her time and time again across various areas of TV shows, music videos and films, such as: Father Stu, Shook, Lady Driver and of course Fall.

On a personal note, I would not refer to climbing a radio tower as an enjoyable thrill, yet watching the film is certainly an enjoyable thrill enough for me. And taking into account the extreme idea of thrill, it is not difficult to see how Fall, the sister film to 47 Metres Down, is a textbook plot for a Lionsgate production with twists and action intermingled as one. Yet, beyond this being a Lionsgate production I found that the screenplay was a blank slate which demanded life, and Colin Jones, who has thoughtfully cast for 47 Metres Down and the latest Resident Evil, has well and truly brought life with his selection of Currey and Gardner who together bounce off each other to develop a complex friendship. What makes Fall such an edge-of-your-seat and feet tingling experience is certainly the relationship between Becky Connor and her dad, as they clash heads and fight on the topic of her dead husband. Both Currey and Morgan are imperative to the roles they play, and they manage to show what is lacking in their relationship. For me I found this especially clear as I realised that the plot would have been very different had Becky sent a text to her dad. Hence the frustrating element as the plot could have turned out very different. However, that frustration is definitely overshadowed by the constant adrenaline rush from the ultimate question – Will they fall?