Criticism of ‘Fall’: Tension in the heights

The first minutes of Scott Mann’s latest film, written together with his usual screenwriter, traverse familiar terrain, the climber subgenre, and take us back to the common places of such satisfying experiences as License to kill (Eastwood, 1965)Maximum risk (Harlin, 1993), Vertical limit (Campbell, 2000) or even the playful Killing me Softly (Kaige, 2002). It is just a small, minimal but highly effective appetizer that introduces us to these adrenaline-addicted characters fleeing from their own, and probably more terrifying, everyday hells and voids, in the same way that fail waves the banner of proudly frivolous cinema, allergic to gravity in both its meanings. Mann, as a good craftsman dedicated to the genre, gets to the point and doesn’t need ten minutes to raise some slight melodramatic conflicts and double, even triple the bet, embracing the high minimalist concept of survival cinema that involves the viewer as an Instagram voyeur, standing as a cunning arithmetic exercise in which you have no choice but to get involved… or stop looking. Pure sensory cinema for restless hearts and kamikaze spirits, at least in the comfort of the seat or the solitude of the living room, which drinks from titles such as Open water (Kentis, 2003)Adrift (Horn, 2006) or Below zero (Green, 2010) and that works as a at 47 meters (Roberts, 2017) with the GPS in the opposite direction, which implies exchanging claustrophobia for vertigo, the depth of the sea for that hostile sky inhabited by evil vultures and the aforementioned 47 meters for… 600! in this time as exhibitionist as it is bewitched by the textures of excess. The best thing is to try to understand its two protagonists, both excellent, and get into their beautiful wounded skin, grasp their conception of vertigo and the challenge of death as a hurricane breath of life, a confirmation of the ephemeral and banal of existence (echoes of the excellent Nerve, a game without rules of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman) and of a surreptitious erotic drive that acts as a substitute (or satisfying) of the absence of human warmth, or why not, of the boredom or dissatisfaction generated by the same inter-individual interaction. Beware of the latter: this is the typical material that David Cronenberg or Julia Ducournau would find exciting. In both ways.

To spend a little over an hour and a half with your eyes open like umbrellas and your stomach in a sailor’s knot

​

DATA SHEET

Address: scott mann Distribution: Grace Fulton, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mason Gooding, Julia Pace Mitchell Country: France Year: 2022 Release date: 6–09-2022 Gender: Drama Script: Christine Angot, Claire Denis Duration: 116 minutes

Synopsis: For Becky and Hunter, life is about overcoming your fears and pushing your limits. However, after climbing to the top of an abandoned communications tower, they find themselves trapped with no way to get down. At 600 meters above the ground and totally away from civilization, the girls will put their skills as expert climbers to the test and will fight desperately to survive even if everything is against them. Will they get it?