Single location movies serve a practical purpose: to run a story without worrying too much about budget constraints. And as the inclinations of humanity have shown, the greater the limitation, the greater the abundance of creativity. However, failure to acknowledge the fundamental flaw in the premise sometimes prevents a movie from becoming great. Sometimes, though, a movie’s sole purpose is to entertain, whether it’s eliciting a palpable sense of horror or a nail-biting sense of tension. Scott Mann’s latest film, “Fall (2022)”, falls more on the latter side of the category.
It’s easy to lampoon “Fall” as “47 Meters Up” since it’s being financed by the producers of “47 Meters Down,” itself a cult classic and a fantastic double-feature companion. Both films follow two close friends who must work together to get out of an unsolvable bind when the extreme sporting event they’re a part of inevitably goes awry. While “150 Feet Down” finds these women submerged in a cage in shark-infested waters, “Fall” finds them trapped 2,000 feet above the top of a radio tower. But we are getting too far ahead of ourselves.
Autumn (2022) Plot Summary and Synopsis of the film
The film opens with best friends Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), with Becky’s husband Sam rock climbing. While manipulating a particularly tricky opening, Dan is startled when a bat flies out of the crack he was clinging to, disturbing him and losing his footing. As Dan hangs in the air, his body connected to his harness, he tries to swing back but falls to his death. Fifty-three weeks later (a year for those who count), Becky’s life is a mess.
Swallowed in grief, resigned to alcohol and alienated from her father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) because her father didn’t trust Dan to be good enough for her, she attempted suicide until Hunter visited her. Hunter tries to comfort her and suggests that Becky go with her to scale a 2,000-foot TV tower in the desert. He would serve the dual purpose of scattering Dan’s ashes once they climb to the top and providing a cathartic experience for Becky to bring closure to her loss and her fear.
Hunter, the adrenaline junkie, has now become an Instagram influencer. The tower climb is the latest in a long line of crazy stunts he performs to attract fame and satiate the adrenaline junkie in him. As they drive up the tower, they stop at a restaurant for dinner, where Hunter shows her how to charge his phone by connecting his charger to the lamp cords and using it as a power outlet. The girls drive up to the tower the next day, but are unable to get past the gate. Therefore, they start walking towards the tower, where they come across a half-dead coyote being attacked by a pack of vultures.
As the vultures are chased away, Hunter snaps a photo of the dead coyote. The girls soon reach the foot of the tower, where they begin to climb the internal staircase. Becky almost backs off because of her nerves, but Hunter talks her into going ahead. There are shots showing how ramshackle the entire tower structure is and how the bolts connecting the stairs and keeping them upright are precariously close to unscrewing due to the pressure being exerted on the steps.
The girls reach the bottom of the internal staircase, which leads to a platform. From there, they must climb another 200 feet to reach the top of the tower. As Becky and Hunter climb the ladder, unbeknownst to them, one of the bolts comes loose. The girls eventually make it to the top of the tower, where they manage to scatter Dan’s ashes. An emotional moment that hit both Becky and Hunter hard. They also take photos of them hanging in precarious positions with the help of Hunter’s 4K camera drone.
Eventually, they decide to start down, but as Becky starts to climb up, the unscrewed part of the ladder comes loose, causing the entire ladder to tip over and fall to the ground. It also causes Becky to drop the bag containing her drone and a bottle of water onto one of the satellite dishes attached below. Hunter manages to lift Becky using the harness. Presumably she causes a large cut on her knee, which Hunter helps stop her bleeding by making a tourniquet. They also found a flare gun and binoculars in the compartment at the base of the tower.
Stuck at the top of the tower, Becky and Hunter are unable to find a signal, rendering their smartphones effectively useless. After waiting five hours and realizing that no one had heard the noise from the stairs and no one was coming to help them, the two tried to look for help with their binoculars and saw a trailer parked near the door. They planned to lower the phone a couple of feet so the phone could regain signal, which would send a pre-written message through Hunter’s Instagram.
They eventually decide to drop the phone by placing it in one of Hunter’s shoes and reinforcing the shoe by padding it with Hunter’s sports bra; the logic is that the phone would recover the signal by dropping and sending the signal. However, the phone breaks, and even a dog belonging to one of the men in the trailer park sniffs the shoe and finds the phone but doesn’t look up at the tower. The girls finally wait until dark before releasing the flare from the flare gun and attracting his attention. Unfortunately, instead of driving the trailer to help them to the gate, the men stole the car that had been parked there.
Becky and Hunter start to get hungry and dehydrated. As charged emotions flare, Becky watches a video of her and Dan’s wedding and notices Hunter’s somber face in the video. Emblazoned with Hunter’s ankle tattoo (“1 4 3”), this compound forces Becky to confront Hunter by revealing that Dan had trouble proclaiming that he loved her, and chose to say those three numbers instead. she. Hunter admits to having an affair with Dan for four months, started by Dan after a drunken encounter. He forced Hunter to distance himself from Becky after Dan’s death because he had broken off the affair with Dan because he valued his friendship with Becky much more.
The next day, after sadly admitting that the phone is broken and no one is coming, Hunter decides to go down to the satellite dish and try to retrieve the bag containing the water and the drone. Using the harness, he lowers himself to the top of the satellite dish and manages to jump to the other dish and retrieve the bag. Hunter uses the selfie stick to reach the harness and manages to reach it. As he starts to climb, Becky pulls her from above, she appears to slip and fall to home plate. Terrified, Becky manages to look down and sees her still alive, although her hands are badly injured. But Becky manages to pick her up.
Becky then tries to deliver a piece of paper with the drone to the motel where they had stayed the night before, but the battery begins to die, forcing them to retrieve the drone. Remembering Hunter’s trick of charging the phone via the lamp cords, Becky climbs up to the port where the tower’s night light is connected. Her injured leg is already beginning to stink, but with considerable effort she manages to climb onto the pole, unscrew the light and connect the drone’s charger with wires and her wedding band as a conduit. As the drone slowly charges, Ella Becky clings to her life throughout the night, barely avoiding the vultures that smell the blood from her injured leg.
Finally, after loading the drone, the girls tape the paper to the drone and fly it over the door to the motel. But, as fate would have it, and as a callback to an earlier scene in the first act, a truck crashes into the drone and destroys it, shattering their hopes of sending a message. Becky soon begins to lose herself from delirium and dehydration, nearly falling off the platform. She finally asks Hunter for her other shoe, so she can put down her phone and call for help. But Hunter coldly replies that she doesn’t have the shoes because she’s not here in the first place.
It is then revealed that she died when Hunter slipped and fell on the plate. Becky had only managed to lift the bag. The “Hunter” who had been helping Becky through the rest of the events up to that point had been a figment of her imagination. It makes sense, since the “Hunter” who had been by Becky’s side after she got back on the platform had been more cautious, trying to give Becky moral support by talking about wrestling, a hobby that only Becky enjoys, or how Hunter convinced Becky to go up the tower to plug in the drone’s charger, so that Becky would survive.
Autumn (2022) Movie ending, explained:
One of the vultures flies out the next day and lands on the platform. Inching closer to Becky’s leg, he begins nibbling at her flesh. Waiting for that moment, Becky manages to capture that vulture by the neck and hit it, killing it. After eating him to regain her strength, Becky finally manages to connect to the harness and throw herself onto the plate, where Hunter’s corpse lies half shattered from the impact of the Fall. His stomach is already exposed after being ripped apart by vultures. The vulture nibbling at Hunter’s meat looks at Becky’s bloodied face and flies away, realizing there is another hunter. Becky, crying in pain and whispering that she loves her, writes a message for her father, inserts the phone into Hunter’s shoe, sticks the shoe into Hunter’s exposed stomach, and then pushes the satellite.
In the next scene, we see Becky’s father, James, driving up to the tower and reaching the base to see police cars and paramedics already present. Her heart sinks as she sees a dead body being carried away by paramedics, but then she finally sees Becky, and the film ends with her rejoining her in tears.
Autumn (2022) Movie Review:
From the point of view of the premise itself, Fall is a flawed movie because it inherently exposes how backed up and clichéd the characters are. To undergo closure, the two leads decide to scale a 2,000-foot tower, which is already rickety and falling apart. But what makes Fall so effortlessly engaging is Scott Mann’s direction, especially during the moments when he films the characters climbing up and focuses intently on the crooked steps, the loose ladder bolts, or the moments of dexterity. physical exhibited by the two protagonists. He manages to make Fall look like a film that doesn’t have enough depth from an emotional perspective (the pedestrian dialogue doesn’t particularly help). Still, as a film capable of causing tension and forcing you to sweaty palms because Mann chose to deploy wide shots and drone shots to evoke the feeling of standing atop a high-rise structure, Fall gets the job done.
This film demonstrates Scott Mann’s expertise as a sound and technically competent director, and Fall is one of those rare and compelling mid-budget movies. Visceral emotion and tension smooth out iffy CGI in specific segments. The performances, especially from Grace Caroline Currey as Becky, make you believe in her character arc, even if the writing doesn’t.
