There was plenty of silliness but also plenty of suspense in 2022’s modestly successful don’t-look-down thriller Fall, a surprisingly well-made micro-budget marvel that ultimately found its audience on Netflix. While certain elements, such as the no-name leads and increasingly hokey script, might have made it seem like yet another churned out low-rent original for the streamer, it boasted more genuine thrills than we’ve come to expect there or really anywhere during this quantity over quality time for genre movies.
A sequel was financially inevitable (the original cost just $3m) but narratively questionable, given that the self-contained survival tale did not lend itself to the elasticity of a franchise. So here we are with Fall 2: Deadpoint, a palm-sweating formula regurgitated with only moderately jolting results. The first film saw two young women trying to get over the loss of a loved one by, naturally, climbing up an abandoned TV tower. So now the sequel has two young women trying to get over the loss of a loved one (who died in the first film) by, naturally, attempting a sky-high plank walk on the side of a mountain in Thailand. History then repeats itself when chaos strikes, this time courtesy of a rockslide, and our heroines have something more than grief to worry about.
If, like me or any other sane person, you struggled to understand why someone would willingly put themselves into such a deeply stupid position in the first film then you’ll be unsurprised to hear that no one has figured out anything smarter for the sequel. The thrill-seeking dummy from Fall, whose death was used as a tiresome eye-roll twist, has since gone viral, as told to us in a cheaply unconvincing montage of social media posts (cheaper, but also funnier, still is the film using a bottle of “Jim Dandie’s” instead of Jack Daniel’s). She has left behind close friend Luce (Queen Charlotte’s Arsema Thomas) and sister Jax (British actor Harriet Slater, faking a solid American accent) who make the bizarre decision to honour her by also risking their lives doing something similarly reckless with help from a conveniently handsome American tour guide (another Briton, Tom Brittney). At one point, a character says to another: “I mean, remember why you’re here in the first place” and I honestly couldn’t tell you why.
The series, as we now must call it, leans heavily on bland motivational thinking (“Fear is something you can control,” etc) but there is no amount of tea towel quotes that can explain why these characters are doing what they’re doing. It’s safest once again not to think too deeply about the hows and whys here and just focus on the horrors, of which there are plenty as disintegrating planks, rusty bars and unfortunate weather cause slipping, screaming and, you guessed it, falling.
I can’t pretend that there aren’t effectively awful moments or that my hand didn’t cover my mouth on occasion, the formula working just the way it should in the film’s most superbly nauseating sequences. There are more ingredients involved here, as is often the case with a sequel, but the more the film explores anything that isn’t a scene aimed at stressing us out to the point of exhaustion, the more the soapy writing disappears into bubbles. The two women are solid leads, believably terrified throughout, but again they’re saddled with a harebrained twist that is conceptually fun but falls apart when thought about for longer than three seconds. The balance of suspense and stupidity ultimately teeters towards the latter in an overcooked finale which gives us another daft twist before, hilariously, setting up an already greenlit third film that promises to be an Avengers-style team-up. I think we might already be at Fall: Endgame.
Fall 2: Deadpoint is out now in US cinemas, in Australia on 3 September and in the UK on 9 September
