Sometimes the scariest movies are the simplest movies. Scott Mann’s 2022 thriller “Fall” was technically about two women who climbed a 2,000-foot, rickety old TV tower and got stuck up there for days. But in reality, it was about Mann realizing heights freak people out and exploiting that fear for nearly two hours. Mann filmed the original “Fall” like a daredevil showing off for a petrified audience, and although the screenplay was functional at best (and I’m being generous), the movie didn’t need any bells and whistles to be terrifying.
“Fall” was cheap and made a profit, so it was only a matter of time before someone made a sequel. But although the original could get away with bare-bones storytelling, you can’t really do that twice because there are only so many ways two people can get stuck very high up and only so many conflicts that can arise while they’re there. No matter how hard they tried to goose it up, “Fall 2: Deadpoint” was always going to feel familiar, and to a fault — and not just because there are earthquakes this time.
Harriet Slater stars as Jax, the younger sister of the thrill-seeking influencer Shiloh, who died in the original film. Harriet is grieving and giving away all of Shiloh’s favorite things when she stumbles across Shiloh’s “Fuck-It List,” a diary containing every seemingly impossible physical challenge her sister wanted to complete before she kicked the bucket. She didn’t get around to them all, obviously, so Shiloh’s friend Luce (Arsema Thomas) suggests the two of them go to Thailand to honor her memory by doing an absurdly dangerous “Plank Walk” on the edge of a cliff.
Jax and Luce aren’t experienced climbers, but apparently no one in this family makes wise decisions, so they hire a guide from a seedy bar to take them up the mountain off-season, when it’s an even worse idea than usual because of rain and rock slides. John (Tom Brittney) only charges them $5,000 to risk their lives, which was already a red flag, but whatever, the movie’s gotta happen somehow. So Luce and John drag Jax up a super tall cliff, and when they discover the path was damaged by a recent earthquake, they press on anyway.
Movies like “Fall 2: Deadpoint” are secretly very spiritual films, because there is obviously a god of some kind in this flick and they’re throwing as many warning signs as they can at Jax and Luce to get them to turn around and go home. By the time our two heroes are stuck on a few planks of wood, all the way up a cliff, with no guide and nowhere to go but straight down while screaming, you’ll be forgiven for throwing them a bit of side-eye. What the heck did they think would happen? Nobody’s saying Jax and Luce deserve to die, but there are only two reasons they’re about to, and their names are Jax and Luce.
Mann co-wrote the screenplay to “Fall 2,” but he gave the directorial duties to Michael and Peter Spierig, a pair of capable genre filmmakers who sometimes hit (“Predestination” and “Daybreakers”) and sometimes miss (“Jigsaw” and “Winchester”). They’re smart enough to get out of this movie’s way and simply film a simple story. After an unnecessarily long buildup, “Fall 2” zips along at a brisk clip, with only two elements holding it back.
The first is — and forgive me for being repetitive, but it’s thematically appropriate — that “Fall 2: Deadpoint” follows a lot of the same beats as the original, especially in the second act. So until the plot finally goes in another direction, your enthusiasm for the sequel may have a lot to do with how recently you watched “Fall.” There’s probably a mathematical formula you could devise where “Fall 2’s” entertainment value equals x times however long it’s been since you saw the first film, or something like that, but I didn’t become a film critic because I’m good at math. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
The other problem with “Fall 2” is that most of the film, and especially most of the acrophobic scares, take place against a sheer rock face. The TV tower in the original had nothing behind it, so every shot was a reminder of how high up the characters were and how easy it would be to, you know, fall. Whenever the Spierig Brothers remember to get a high angle on the action, “Fall 2” can be just as thrilling as its predecessor, but a lot of the time we’re looking at two actors filmed against a flat background, which isn’t as suspenseful as watching two actors hanging over a precipice.
“Fall 2: Deadpoint” really picks up at the end, rescuing a film that could have been just more of the same. The climax still requires the heroes to make the most comedically ill-advised decisions anyone could ever make, but at least those scenes provide a welcome burst of energy. Besides, once you embrace the “Die Hard 2” of it all — the same implausible sh-t may not happen to the same person twice, but it happens to their sister and that’s just as absurd — it’s easy to forgive this schlocky sequel for being, God forbid, a schlocky sequel.
