After 2022’s high-stakes (and just plain high) thriller Fall, which featured two twenty-somethings stuck at the top of a 2000ft tower in the desolate American desert, comes Fall 2 (or Fall 2: Deadpoint everywhere else but here) which whisks us away to Thailand in the hopes of more vertigo-inducing thrills.
I’ve always been terrified of heights and the thought of being marooned with only an overly-positive adventure ‘influencer’ leaves me positively morose, but the first Fall movie proved a pretty fruitless experience, despite its interesting premise.
‘You girls wanted to climb a mountain. There it is!’
This sequel – another chip off the Signature Entertainment block – fares better than its predecessor, helped greatly by better direction and, by the looks of it, a more generous budget, but it’s really a game of inches up here in the rarefied air. Fall saw its heroine, Becky, egged on by her ambitious daredevil best friend Hunter. Here, we join Hunter’s sister Jax, played by Harriet Slater, a year or so on from the events at the tower. She’s doing her best to deal with the aftermath of her sister’s fateful climb, namely the feverish reaction from Hunter’s followers (or Fall-owers) on social media, who have very nearly deified her as an ironclad symbol of adventurous spirit.
Though the pair are complete strangers to each other, Jax soon finds herself trawling through Hunter’s old truck with Luce, another of her sister’s closest friends. When they find a bucket list full of other daring climbs that Hunter intended to do, Luce suggests that they take up the mantel and take on one such climb together to achieve some form of closure.
And so, despite her better judgement, reluctant and tremulous Jax winds up following in her sister’s footsteps, making her way to Thailand to reach the summit of the treacherous Mount Kwan. Legend has it that at the top, a statue of the grim Deth Dragon (spelt differently but means the same thing) will eat your fears, which may well be just what she needs…
While we wouldn’t all jump at the chance of stranding ourselves at the top of a mountain with nothing to lean on but some tiny planks of wood that hug the cliffside and some woman we just met, very few of us are the stars of our own horror movie. This new instalment does suffer from an onslaught of setup that just wasn’t necessary in the first film, though, which did have a certain ‘elevator pitch’ simplicity to it.
Both films are very similar to each other (there’s seemingly only so much you can do with this premise) but surprisingly, where before, the first film set out on a strong note and went awry, a top-heavy opening here leads to a stronger second and third act than its predecessor, which almost became a parody of itself by the end.
Despite so much exterior window dressing (the girls’ route is, bafflingly, frequented by drug smugglers trying to get over the border into Myanmar), taking original director Scott Mann out of the jumpseat lets The Spierig Brothers come in to deliver on some more gripping and perilous sequences than anything that came before. Mount Kwan looms in the background of scenes like some giant grey ghost, and when our two core characters are climbing amidst a July monsoon, there are some good moments of tension to be found, with one sequence in particular carrying a bit of that energy that’ll have you saying ‘Go on. Go on’ as the pair take on a death-defying challenge.
As ever, though, the writing remains a misstep, with Mann and his co-writer Jonathan Frank teaming up for a second time here. Perhaps the ideal conditions for a climb like this would be in a forty-minute, nail-biting short that could properly wring every bit of natural, inherent fear out of the premise. In extending the concept into a full feature, though, both men seem determined to saddle the story with a rucksack’s worth of additional baggage through which to plod. Obviously, you have to make sure your characters come away from things having learned something, but the efforts made to stoke drama and discontent between the leads feel cliche when a more confident creative would chuck those threads off the side of the cliff to make room for more stomach-churning action.
Though I can’t tell you where this film caps off by the time the credits roll, it’s interesting to hear that Fall 3 will be with us before long. These sequels were green-lit together, with this instalment clearly leading to some climactic climb that will no doubt be billed as ‘the epic conclusion of the trilogy’ sometime next year or beyond. In the cinema, I almost expected a Back to the Future Part II style coda with a micro-trailer for the next film, but principal photography has yet to begin. They’re no doubt waiting to see how this fares at the box office before committing to a third and final film, but it’s worth saying that for all the faults of both instalments in the franchise so far, I’d be intrigued to see how things wrap up…
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate threat, violence, injury detail, drug references, strong language.
Fall 2 is in cinemas now.
