Fall 2 review: Breathless, edge-of-the-seat moments abound in disaster sequel

The first Fall film in 2022 proved to be an effective, low-budget, high-concept survival thriller in which Virginia Gardner's bubbly thrill-seeker persuades her grief-stricken climber pal (Grace Caroline Currey) to get back on the horse, so to speak, by scaling a 2,000-foot TV aerial tower in the middle of the Californian desert. Of course, the rub comes when the rusty structure starts to fall apart, leaving the pair stranded at the top.

The visceral fears of audiences continue to provide fertile ground for film-makers, whether it’s creepy crawlies (and spiders, especially), confined spaces or vertigo-inducing heights.

The latter has produced plenty of giddying, stomach-churning moments in recent years, whether it’s Tom Cruise hanging off Dubai’s Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol or various planes in Rogue Nation and Dead Reckoning.

Documentaries inevitably add extra authenticity, such as the terrifying sight of Alex Honnold scaling California’s El Capitan mountain without a rope or safety harness in 2019 Oscar winner Free Solo.

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Or 2008’s Man on Wire (also Oscar-winning), which chronicled how French daredevil Philippe Petit pulled off “the artistic crime of the century” in 1974 by tightrope-walking between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center.

The fact there is only photographic proof and no actual footage of his extraordinary perambulation was later rectified when director Robert Zemeckis dramatised the feat in The Walk (2015). Describing the climactic wire walk scene as squirm-inducing can’t do it justice when viewed on an IMAX screen.

Indeed, what made Fall so potent was the deft way co-writer/director Scott Mann blurred the line between FX and reality — the upper part of the tower was built on the top of a mountain — although he’s only producing and co-writing sequel Fall 2 with the Spierig brothers (Predestination) taking over the direction.

Since the events of the first movie, Hunter’s videos have gone viral, not that younger sister Jax (British actor Harriet Slater) wants to know as the siblings were not on good terms. However, Luce (Arsema Thomas), a friend of Hunter’s, convinces Jax to try a challenge even her sister didn’t accomplish, namely a plank walk along the sheer, 4,000-foot-high cliff-face of Mount Kwan in Thailand, a forbidding monolith that’s been closed to the public for 30 years.

Local guide Jon (Tom Brittney) is initially reluctant to accompany them, not just because of the obvious dangers from altitude sickness (so oxygen tanks are required), passing storms and sudden rockslides, but also the presence of drug traffickers in the region. However, he relents and it’s then that the acrophobes out there will find their palms getting on the clammy side.

A rickety metal ladder straight up into the mist is only the start, followed by a “path” made up of chain handrails and weather-beaten slats loosely attached to pipes drilled into the rock. And up ahead is the ominous Devil’s Elbow, an acutely angled corner of the mountain, which ultimately leads to a dragon statue “that will eat your fears”…

The catalogue of threats and obstacles facing the girls offers a different tempo to the original Fall where the tension was confined to the one tower location. However, their ingenuity and chutzpah to escape what is thrown at them by the elements provides plenty of breathless, edge-of-the-seat moments that makes up for the less convincing special effects this time around.

Roll on a visit to Hell’s Chasm in the already greenlit Fall 3.

Fall 2 is now showing in UK cinemas.

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