The premise of Fall is simple: two women climb a 2,000 foot decommissioned radio tower and get stuck. For a little while, that actually works. There’s a genuine tension to being stranded that high up with no way down, and the movie does a decent job of making you feel it early on.
The problem is everything around that premise. Hunter is a walking red flag who peer pressures her grieving best friend into climbing a sketchy tower neither of them has any business being on. Becky’s husband literally died climbing, and this is the plan to help her move on? Nobody tells anyone where they’re going. No prep, no experience, nothing. And Becky’s dad is somehow worse, basically telling her to get over her dead husband.
Once they’re stuck, the tension starts falling apart because the conflict relies on them making increasingly dumb decisions. Throwing the shoe and breaking the phone, not figuring out how to shimmy down the pole to the cage (actual lineman technique), not thinking to knock out the tower light so a utility crew would come check on it. The situation should feel inescapable, but instead it feels like they’re just not trying hard enough. Granted, I’m saying this from the comfort of my bed and not 2,000 feet up, so who knows how I’d actually react. But these two are supposed to be climbers. You’d think some outdoor climbing experience would at least give them a few more ideas than what they came up with.
The pacing doesn’t help either. An hour and forty minutes is way too long for this setup. There are only so many ways to build on “we’re still stuck” before it gets repetitive, and the movie runs out of ideas well before it ends.
Then there’s the ending. The twist that Hunter has been dead since she hit the cage and Becky hallucinated their interactions is supposed to hit hard, but it mostly just makes a chunk of the movie feel pointless. And after sitting through the whole ordeal, they don’t even show the rescue. All that buildup for nothing.
It’s not purely unwatchable. The initial tension of being stuck is real, and the concept is at least interesting. But a movie like The Descent does the survival thing so much better by adding layers beyond just the location. Fall is just the tower, and once that wears off, there’s nothing left. I was honestly just glad it was over.