What’s It About

Two women find themselves in a desperate fight for survival when a mountain rockslide leaves them stranded on a fragile plank more than 3,000 feet in the air.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Let me start with the good news. There are about twenty minutes in the middle of this movie where I forgot I was sitting in a theater. My hands were sweating. I caught myself whispering “no, no, no” out loud like somebody’s grandmother in church. That’s real. That’s what this kind of movie is supposed to do to you. The bad news is that the other seventy-something minutes are filled with choices so strange that I went from gripping my armrest to laughing at things nobody meant to be funny. The first “Fall” came out in 2022, and director Scott Mann built the whole thing around one simple idea: put two women on top of a two-thousand-foot radio tower in the middle of the desert and let the audience squirm. It worked. People covered their eyes. People hid behind their dates. Some folks straight up walked out. And for a movie that cost almost nothing to make, it brought back serious money. You can’t argue with that math. So here we are with a sequel, and Mann has stepped back from the director’s chair. He co-wrote the script with Jonathan Frank, but brothers Peter and Michael Spierig are running the show now. Their instinct was clearly to go bigger, and they took that idea literally. Two thousand feet becomes four thousand. A radio tower in the desert becomes a mountain on the border between Thailand and Myanmar. More height, more danger, more everything. The story picks up after Shiloh Hunter (Virginia Gardner) fell to her death in the first film. Since then, she’s blown up online. Podcasters won’t stop talking about her. Influencers post about her like she’s a legend. The movie opens with a stack of clips of strangers calling her a hero and tagging her as “#Fallgirl.” Her little sister Jax (Harriet Slater) hates every bit of it. She just wants to remember Shiloh as her sister, not as a hashtag, and she carries a heavy bag of guilt because she never had the nerve to chase danger the way Shiloh did. Then Jax finds Shiloh’s journal, a list of wild things her sister planned to do before she died. Shiloh’s college friend Luce (Arsema Thomas) shows up and tells Jax she should finish what her sister started. And here’s where I started raising my eyebrows. A very trusting Jax quits her job and flies across the world with a woman she met a few days earlier. Their target is Mount Kwan, a made-up peak with a “plank walk” carved into its side. That means a few old wooden boards held up by rusty pipes hammered into bare rock, four thousand feet above the ground. There’s no railing worth mentioning. The real-life inspiration, the Huashan Plank Trail in China, is much safer and much better maintained, but safe doesn’t sell tickets. When Jax and Luce reach the camp at the bottom, they learn it’s the wet season and no experienced guides will take them up. You would think two people planning a trip halfway around the world might have checked that first, but research isn’t this movie’s strong suit. They find an expat climber named John (Tom Brittney), pay him to break the law, and start climbing a trail that’s been closed to the public for decades. Once they’re actually out on those boards, the movie finally comes alive. It takes a minute to buy into it, because the mountain is so obviously built on a computer that your brain keeps reminding you none of it is there. But the Spierig brothers wear you down. The middle third of this ninety-seven-minute film had my stomach in knots. First the rain comes, and the wood turns slick. Then small rocks start falling. Then the rocks get bigger, tear out a section of the walkway, and cut Jax and Luce off from John, the only person up there who knows what he’s doing. I’m scared of heights myself, and those scenes got me good. But that’s where the movie runs out of gas. There’s only so long you can point a camera straight down at a valley and expect it to carry a story. So just like the first film, “Deadpoint” fills its last act with twists. I won’t spoil them, but one revelation is silly, and the one that follows is worse. Neither one adds real drama. They just add noise, and they turned a tense survival movie into something I couldn’t take seriously. The bigger problem is how the movie treats where it’s set. Thai locals warn these women not to climb. The trail is closed; it’s the wrong season, and people die out there. The women go anyway, because why not? Facing your fears matters more than listening to people who actually know the mountain. Later, when things fall apart and those same locals won’t risk their lives to rescue two tourists who ignored every warning,all of a sudden, the locals are the bad guys. That’s a straight Karen way of thinking. There’s a whole lot of “the American traveler’s personal growth matters more than anybody else’s life” wrote into this script, and the movie never seems to notice or care that it’s doing it. Moving this series overseas was supposed to make it feel bigger. Instead, it exposed something ugly. Jax comes out of this even harder to root for. By the end, she’s turned into someone who blames everybody but herself, even though nobody dragged her up that mountain. Under different circumstances, I’d have sympathy for her, because grief truly does make people do senseless things. But not this time. The constant flip-flopping between self-reliant and victim and back to being in complete control was more sickening than heroic. The ending was no better, as it had the audacity to set up what they hope will be a third film. Did the production team actually look at the final film? That’s a bold assumption for a sequel that mostly copies the first one’s homework and adds a little decoration. There are genuine thrills here, and the bigger scale earns a few of them. But every time this movie has a chance to trust its simple, terrifying idea, it reaches for a plot twist instead. That’s the real fall.

OUR RATING – A BRAVE-ISH 4