Fall (2022)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com February 23, 2023

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes bad things happen to good people because they make stupid choices. Granted, things happen to make things worse, but the two main characters put themselves in this situation. Overall, it’s pretty good though and one to make your palms sweat.

Synopsis

Becky and Dan Connor climb a mountain. Vertically. With not enough safety equipment. Friend Shiloh Hunter is there too. Dan falls, and we see that there is a safety line, but since it’s about to pull out of the wall, it’s not a very good one. He does, in fact, fall to his death. Credits roll.

Almost a full year later, Becky’s father, James calls, but she lets it go to the machine. He eventually tracks her down at a club to tell Becky that she needs to get over Dan. She’s getting carried away with self-pity. He’s not wrong, and she knows he’s not wrong, but she doesn’t want to listen. She goes home and does pills and booze.

Then Hunter comes over. She has a plan and needs a partner. She wants to climb the B67 TV Tower. Beckyt mopes and whines, but the next morning, she agrees to do it. Hunter does all this risky stuff for her YouTube channel, and she uses the proceeds to fund her traveling.

They stop at a diner near the tower, and Hunter shows us an improv way to recharge a phone by plugging it into a lightbulb socket. They drive as close as they can to the tower; it’s way out in the desert, and they have to walk nearly a mile from the car to get there, past a bunch of vultures eating a nearly-dead animal.

They arrive at the foot of the huge tower. It’s over 2000 feet tall. Becky starts to cry, “I can’t do it.” Hunter gives her a pep talk about “kicking fear in the ass.” Becky gives in and starts climbing; there’s a ladder, so how hard could it be? The camera pans to a support cable looking all wobbly. We see loose bolts and worn ladder rungs all over the place; this tower isn’t being maintained.

Two thousand feet later, they arrive at the top of the main tower, where there’s a platform. There’s another two hundred meters of vertical pole to climb, but it’s got a rickety ladder too, so they don’t stop. Hunter climbs up to the big dish antenna, and Becky is terrified but forces herself to do it at Hunter’s prompting. Becky watches as a bolt falls off past her face.

Hunter makes it to the top, where there’s a teeny, tony little platform about four feet wide. Becky scrabbles up behind her, and we see another bolt fall off. They launch a drone and take crazy footage of Hunter hanging by one arm from the tower. Hunter wants Becky to hang by one hand too, and Becky doesn’t have enough sense to argue.

Becky finally calms down and gets into it. She brought Dan’s ashes along to dump from the top of the tower. Oddly enough, Hunter cries too. They decide to climb back down.

Becky goes first, and the entire ladder collapses under her. There is much screaming and dangling as the ladder impacts the ground nearly a half-mile below them. Hunter manages to pull Becky back up, but it doesn’t look easy.

The ladder is gone.

Neither of them have cell phone signals. “We’re too high for signals,” Becky says; that’s not how that works, but they are way out in the desert. All their water and supplies are down at the tower platform. Hunter is sure that someone must have heard all that metal hit the ground. Not only that, but Becky has a big gash in her leg from the falling debris or something.

As they wait for help, both of them talk to the camera for the YouTube channel. They get the bright idea to send a message to Hunter’s many Insta followers. They’ll hit “post” and then dangle the phone from a rope in hopes of getting some coverage down below them. It doesn’t work. What if they just drop the phone, reinforced inside something like “the egg drop challenge?” They use Hunter’s shoe and bra to pad the fall.

They see a man and his dog walking down at the base of the tower. They scream, but he doesn’t hear them. They throw shoes down to get his attention, but only the dog notices. The man actually finds the shoe, but then he doesn’t look up.

Night falls. Becky watches old videos on Hunter’s phone. There are two men in an RV down below, and the two girls shoot off their only flare. The two men see them on top of the tower but instead of calling help, they steal Hunter’s car. Ouch!

The sun comes up, and Becky figures out that Hunter had been having an affair with Dan, Becky’s husband. Awkward! Hunter tells the whole story, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been. Becky takes off her wedding ring.

Hunter thinks maybe the rope is long enough to reach the satellite dish far below them. She might be able to climb down there and reach their backpack. She climbs down, but it’s not long enough. She swings, lets go of the rope, and lands on the big dish. She gets a drink of water. The rope is quite a ways out of reach for her.

Hunter uses her selfie stick to gain a few feet and hooks the backpack onto the dangling rope. She jumps off the dish and grabs the backpack and rope. Now Becky has to pull Hunter back up. She gets all the way to the top and then slides all the way back down, slicing up her hands, but she’s all right otherwise. Now it’s completely up to Becky to pull Hunter up– but she does!

Now with the backpack in-hand, they write a note and put it in their drone. They can see the diner from where they are; can the drone make it that far? No. The battery starts to fail, and they barely manage to retrieve the drone. They don’t have any power to recharge it.

It gets dark again, and in the middle of the night Becky wakes up to being alone except for attacking vultures. No- it’s just a dream. Hunter looks up at the bright blinking red airplane warning light above them and decides she can use her little socket trick to recharge the drone. She can’t do the climb, so Becky has to do it.

Becky has to climb another hundred feet or so on a small pole. Hunter says “It’s just like pole dancing!” Becky unscrews the bulb and has to hotwire it somehow to charge the plug– she uses her wedding ring. It works. Still, it’s gonna take hours to charge, right? Well, through the power of imaginary filmmaking, she holds on to that pole with her legs and fingers for however long that takes while avoiding swooping vultures pecking at her injured leg.

She climbs back down to where Hunter is. They wait for the diner to open and try the drone again. It flies all the way to the road and then gets hit by a truck about a hundred feet short of the diner.

Suddenly, Becky has a burst of reality. Hunter fell to her death when she was going for the backpack yesterday. She’s been hallucinating her for most of the day.

There’s a thunderstorm that night, and it gets pretty hairy. Becky records a personal video for her father, how he was right about everything.

The next morning, the vultures come for Becky, and she grabs one. She kills it and eats it raw. Fed and recharged, she ties her rope and starts climbing down to where Hunter’s body lies. She takes off Hunter’s shoe and puts her phone in it like before– then she puts it inside the hole in Hunter’s belly and rolls her off. Then the satellite dish she’s sitting on starts to buckle.

We cut to Becky’s father, who arrives with helicopters, ambulances, and a zillion cops. Becky is there– she survived.

So who’s going to talk Becky into climbing something crazy next year?

Commentary

The B67 TV tower is real, and it’s the fourth tallest structure in the USA. The establishing shots of the tower are real, and the part where the actors are shown on the tower is a 100-foot-tall replica. There was minimal CGI and no green-screen used in this film.

This is a great advertisement for “extreme sports” of all kinds. Fear exists for a reason.

They made a big deal about recharging the drone, but their phones both managed to keep a charge for three days? Yeah, right. Hunter’s face is untouched after 24 hours with the vultures? I think they go for the eyes first.

The bears, sharks, and freezing temperatures of this week’s films didn’t get to me in the least, but Kevin and I both had sweaty palms throughout this one. It was all just so unnecessary and stupid in the first place; these two really kinda had it coming to them.

It’s the stupidest situation of all the films this week, but it’s also the best made and most tense.