Another movie about people in peril is Fall, a film which no one who suffers from a fear of heights will feel comfortable watching.  That includes me.  The filmmaking team does a masterful job of framing the camera to maximize the views looking down and the precariousness of the half-mile high perch that two young women find themselves upon.  I figured the perspectives would bother me, and they did, but that’s part of the fun of a film like this.  But boy was I relieved when it was over.

Scott Mann’s film follows two young female climbers: Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), who has recently lost her husband in a climbing accident, and her best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who suggests climbing an old television antenna tower in the middle of nowhere as therapy.  Becky is persuaded to make the climb and all goes well until they start down, when the ladder separates and falls to earth, leaving the pair stranded on a narrow platform with little food or water and no cell phone signal (it’s too high!).

This simple but effective premise is kicked into a higher gear by secrets that slowly reveal themselves as the hours pass, by a pair of men who notice the stranded pair, by the flying wildlife that surround the platform, the weather elements and the increasing likelihood that the two young women are going to perish from their stupidity, hoist on their own petard, as it were.  And then there’s the height.  Interestingly, this aspect is subdued because neither woman is afraid of heights, or sheer drops.  If one or both of them were hyperventilating because of their predicament, this might have been really difficult for someone with height issues to watch.

A surprise occurs late in the story which I still haven’t made up my mind about, whether it makes sense or is a trick play by the filmmakers.  And then the film takes a shortcut at the end, depriving us of seeing the actual rescue (I still wonder how it was actually managed, and I would have liked to see that).  Still, what’s onscreen for the first 80 to 90 minutes is very well done, quite nerve-wracking, and quite believable.  It amazes me that people willingly put themselves in positions like this — even in the opening scene, when the husband falls to his death — and yet they do.  If they didn’t, a movie like this wouldn’t make any sense.  Climb on, crazy people.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  27 August 2022.