Fall: a vivid, vertiginous thriller

Essentially a two-hander, Scott Mann’s Fall has no choice but to rely on tangible chemistry between its leads. Fortunately, Virginia Gardner and Grace Caroline Currey, as the relentlessly upbeat Hunter and her traumatised best friend Becky respectively, play off each other with credible conviction.

When the two women find themselves marooned, 40 minutes into the film, on the small octagonal platform at the top of a 2,000-foot TV tower in the western desert with no means of descent, it hardly comes as a surprise. The omens have been laid out for us: a pair of vultures feeding on a dying prairie dog, close-ups of the tower’s rusty bolts rattling as the climbers start their ascent, Hunter’s breezy assurances (“You can do this!”) only serving to accentuate Becky’s nervous apprehension. Mann (Heist, 2015; The Tournament, 2009) doesn’t generally go in for complex movies, and as soon as we see the two young women approach the tower they’re proposing to climb, it’s easy enough to see what’s coming.

The fascination of the film lies in the increasingly desperate stratagems they employ in the hope of getting rescued, and in watching as one by one each of their attempts inevitably hits the buffers.  Amid the terror, though, Mann finds room for unexpectedly touching moments – as when Becky scatters from the summit the ashes of her husband Dan, who died on the climb that kicks off the film’s story.

Only once does Fall do something wholly unpredictable, and regrettably it’s a move that knocks a hole in the film’s narrative structure. Around fifteen minutes before the end of the movie, it’s revealed that the events we’ve been shown in the previous twenty minutes have been a fantasy in Becky’s mind – a retrospective hiatus that adds little but frustration as we mentally peel away what happened from what didn’t.

This apart, Mann and his team make creative use of what’s not only a two-hander but, for most of its length, a single-location movie, comparable to Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth (2002) or Steven Knight’s Locke (2015). DoP MacGregor (who also shot Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium, 2019) deploys a series of inventively vertiginous angles, while making lyrical play with the desert sky in its changing moods, their subtlety echoed in Tim Despic’s score. Gardner and Curry’s performances grow more dynamic as the tension mounts, but plaudits should also go to the crew of stunt and climbing doubles who, by the look of it, earned their bread many times over.

► Fall is in UK cinemas now.