Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fall’ on VOD, a Simple-Premise Thriller That’ll Feast on Your Acrophobia

Fall (now available to stream on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is a classic single-location B-movie hyper-focused on exploiting a single elemental fear: very, very high heights (also known as acrophobia). And so two women clamber to the top of a supertall skinny thing and we endure a number of EFF-THIS moments for the better part of 107 minutes, and sometimes, if it’s done well, that’s all you need from a movie. Now let’s see if Fall does it right.

FALL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Some call them thrillseekers, others call them maniacs: Three human beings are but dots on a massive cliff face. They climb, with ropes and harnesses and carabiners and those anchor thingies and NO FEAR BEYOTCH! Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Dan (Mason Gooding) are a sweet young married couple stealing a smooch as they dangle, and Shiloh (Virginia Gardner) is the crazy one they jokingly call “Ethan Hunt.” But there’s an incident, and calling it merely an “incident” is like saying World War II was just a thing that happened once. Dan slips. Plummets. Screams. And from here, one can only make assumptions: He goes splat and ceases being alive.

SUBTITLE: 51 WEEKS LATER. Becky, despite being a Zillennial, still has an answering machine, which might be the film’s biggest test of our suspension of disbelief, and trust me, some real doozies are coming. It receives a call from her worried father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). She’s not home to answer because she’s at the bar again. At the bottom of a bottle. Crocked. You can tell she’s depressed before we even see her bleary half-mast eyes, because there are empty pizza boxes and takeout containers strewn about her home. There’s also a bottle of pills in the liquor cabinet. She dumps them on the counter, and contemplates. Nearby, a cardboard box with a big label on it: CREMATED REMAINS. That’s all that’s left of poor Dan. And there’s not much left of poor Becky, either.

She really needs something to shake this brutal funk, and Shiloh has a great idea: They’ll drive out to that rusty old 2,000-foot decommissioned TV tower in the desert and climb the living crap out of it. That way Becky can stare her fears right in the face until they cry, and then scatter Dan’s ashes to the wind. Shiloh is a professional YouTube stunt doofus known as Danger D, and it’s therefore her job to be an annoying idiot. And so she squeezes into her cleavageiest push-up bra, grabs Becky and up they go, the ladder all rickety and oxidized, the wind moaning, and did they put on enough sunscreen? These white girls are pale.

Notably – and when I say “notably,” I mean, “someone wants to hammer on our skulls with quasi-symbolism” – before they get to climbing, they see some vultures snacking on some poor dead animals’ guts. Now, what kind of vultures are they? Well, they’re Vultures of Ominous Portent, of course. There are no other species of vulture, or other types of portent, in movies like this. And so Becky and Shiloh climb to the top and get some sickkkkkkk selfies and drone footage and climb back down and live happily ever after with all the likes and clicks they could ever possibly need to nurture and satisfy their souls. No! They actually climb to the top and slip on fresh vulture caca and fall down down down to their horrible awful deaths. No! I’m not gonna spoil it, you gotta suffer through an hour-plus of queasy instances of acrophobia yourself to find out what happens!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Vertigo, but stripped way, way, way, way down. But it reminds me more of 47 Meters Down, in which Mandy Moore and Claire Holt sit at the bottom of the ocean and try not to be eaten by a murdershark, or Frozen, wherein a trio of skiers get trapped on a chairlift over a long weekend.

Performance Worth Watching: Curry and Gardner are perfectly fine here doing the not very much that’s asked of them. So let’s use this space to heap praise upon the vulture wranglers, because we get so few opportunities to do so.

Memorable Dialogue: Shiloh delivers a good dual-threat howler because it works both in and out of context: “The vultures, they can smell your leg.”

Sex and Skin: None:

Our Take: Fall is clearly a movie written by Gen Xers making a statement about the folly of younger generations’ desire to be dipshits in an attempt to assuage the insatiable hunger of the internet. The cruel, harsh world – symbolized by the Vultures of Ominous Portent, of course – shall punishest thou for your foolhardy quest for meme fame, ye peabrained youths! Bottom line: Don’t be stupid, Gen Z dummies!

Am I reading too much into the subtext here? Perhaps the greater question is, why does the “modern twist” in a good old-fashioned low-budget dumbass thriller always have to involve tech and/or social media? Does it function as yet another metaphorical missive on how the internet will be the death of us all? I sigh, especially in the context of a movie that insists its twentysomething protagonist has a landline. And to that I say GET REAL, Hollywood hogwashers!

To be fair, on a surface level – and let’s be honest, that’s the level upon which Fall is intended to function – director Scott Mann effectively exploits all the stuff that’ll make you clench your glutes as our protagonists do desperate and/or foolhardy things: Loose rattling bolts on rickety ladders, unsettling silence, nerve-gnawing soundtrack cues, the cold dead eyes of unfeeling vultures. He knows how to effectively manipulate the base fears of his audience. The film suffers from pacing issues as it toys around with an unnecessary subplot designed to make us care about more than just the characters’ core survival; this type of keep-it-simple-stupid thing should be wrapping at 85 minutes. And then Mann pretty much shits the bed at the end, progressing from UH HUH levels of incredulity to an outright NAH, although it’s out-loud laughable enough to be entertaining. It could be worse, is what I’m saying. Way worse.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Come for the clenched-teeth-emojis, stay for the LOLs.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.