A couple of months ago, my 10 year old dragged me to the couch and begged me to rent a movie she’d seen with her friends. It was her favorite movie in the world, she said, and she wanted to share the experience with me. It was a modern classic, a masterpiece of cinema. (Well, those may not have been her exact words, but you get the idea.)
What was the movie, you ask? Fall, starring Grace Caroline Currey (Shazam! Fury of the Gods) and Virginia Gardner (American Horror Stories).
Fall, directed by Scott Mann and written by Mann and Jonathan Frank, is about every parent’s worst nightmare: your kids celebrating their autonomy by going out and doing the stupidest, most pointlessly dangerous thing possible. In this case, Becky (Currey), grieving the death of her husband after a climbing accident, agrees to climb a 2,000 foot tall TV tower so that her friend Hunter (Gardner) can chase some delicious clout online. They break into the property surrounding the derelict tower, climb it using a rusty utility ladder, and then take some videos on the top so that Hunter can post them to her Youtube channel.
However! When they start back down, they’re confronted with a nasty surprise: the ladder has corroded and fallen away, leaving them stranded at the top. Obviously they didn’t tell anyone where they were going or make any sort of safety plan, so they have to figure out how to get down all by themselves.
Does the plot make any sense at all? Nope. Are the characters believable? Of course not. Does the movie have an ounce of realism? Doesn’t seem like it! But is it a ton of fun? Hell yeah, it is.
Seriously, when my kid sat me down in front of this movie, I braced myself for two hours of tedious, formulaic survival thriller fare. I’m just not into thrillers! I’m sorry, but most of them are boring clones of each other! In the third act of Fall, though, I found myself screaming and biting a couch cushion, riveted by the absolutely ridiculous drama unfolding before me. How weird can filmmakers get when their characters spend the whole movie sitting on top of a giant antenna? They can get weird. This movie goes to some truly wild places.
So. If you’ve got a free evening and you’re not afraid of heights? Or if, like me, you are afraid of heights and you want to torture yourself? Fall is worth a watch. Make up a drinking game to go along with it. You’ll be glad you did.
(featured image: Hulu)
