FLIP FEATURE
September 15, 2022
“I told Mom I did not want to see this movie,” my dad groaned once the opening scene started up.
I had been meaning to drag my mom up to the theater that night, but as it turned out, I ended up dragging my dad along because I am a young person and going to a frightening “survival horror” movie might lead to an anxiety attack.
So we were put in a completely empty theater and goofed around for the upcoming movie ads before getting down to business. And that’s when the first surprise hit. Fall is a movie made partly by Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed!?
Honestly, kind of telling considering how trash this movie was.
Fall is a predictable, boring movie with the only thing going for it being a fear of heights and spiking people’s anxiety. I had seen the same plot and surprises before. It felt like it was a direct copy of 47 Meters Under.
The plot (without spoilers) goes like this: after the death of her husband, a woman gets pressured by her friend to face her fear of climbing, which is how her husband died. She gets pressured up a 2,000 feet tall tower and the two friends end up getting stuck up there.
I ended up hating the characters. They were so bland and the drama that ensued was so boring that I found my eyes drifting to look at anything other than them. The scenery was so boring that it physically broke me out of the trance of the movie. With so many wide sweeping shots, there was nothing to see but endless desert, which isn’t particularly interesting.
The movie did have two strong suits: the relationship between the main character and her dad, and the general anxiety of the movie mixed with eventual body horror. I did happen to feel the pure stress oozing from the movie, which eventually almost led to an anxiety attack in the theater, which my dad was able to calm me down from, but he himself had to do laps around the desolate room to calm down.
I could yell out every beat of the story at least five minutes before it happened, and it wasn’t usually a huge Chekhov’s gun. I guessed what the movie was about when I first saw the trailer, which played before Thor: Love and Thunder, a movie much more worth your money.
At the end of the movie on that lonely Wednesday night, my dad expressed his opinion, and he liked it. I, however, did not, and it is not my father writing this review. My advice? Don’t spend your money on tickets to this. If you really really crave the anxiety of watching two women slowly suffer on top of a tower, wait until it comes out on whatever streaming platform it comes out on. The slightly burnt popcorn was of more worth.
