Fall is being promoted as "from the producers of 47 Meters Down," which is a clever move for two films that could be sisters — or a future cult classic double feature. Both films follow a pair of deeply bonded women who must pull together to survive an extreme sporting trip gone fatally off the rails. While 47 Meters Down plunged audiences into shark-infested waters, Fall perches us high atop a dilapidated radio tower, where vultures and gravity itself threaten to destroy our plucky heroines. But there's something more twisted that ties these two films together. So, let’s drop into spoilers.
Fall follows recent widow Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and her bestie Hunter (Virginia Gardner) as they climb a 2,000-foot pole to spread the ashes of Becky's late husband. Inevitably, disaster strikes, leaving the women trapped atop the tower on a creaky platform, with no food, no water, no way down, and no cell reception that would allow them to call for help. Then, with emotions already at a boil, Hunter makes the shattering declaration that she cheated with Becky’s beau before he bit it in a deadly climb gone wrong a year back. There’s a chance that these two fighting friends might pull together to survive, but even as it seems like they just might make it after all, the movie has one last gruesome surprise in store: One is actually already dead.
How did Hunter die?
Hunter’s dirty secret of infidelity is out, stinking up that platform worse than Becky’s festering leg wound. 24 hours have passed since they tried dropping Hunter’s phone in a shoe with a distress message in the hopes that it might catch the cell reception at the base of the tower. They assume her 60,000 social media followers haven’t gotten the call to action, and the phone is smashed to useless bits below.
Thirsty, starving, and exhausted, they’re getting weaker by the hour. So, desperate times call for desperate measures: Hunter goes down the bit of rope they have to recover the backpack that Becky accidentally dropped on an outcropping dish antenna. Almost immediately, Hunter and her one remaining red sneaker are scrambling to get a grip on the pole. Valiantly or foolishly, she unhooks herself from the safety rope and takes a risky leap to the dish. With some “good MacGyver shit,” she attaches the backpack to the rope, where Becky can haul it up. But how to get Hunter back up?
What Fall shows is the two friends overcoming their differences and broken hearts to literally pull together to get Hunter to safety. But like 47 Meters Down (or Adrift or a certain cut of The Descent), this thriller secretly switches into the unreal. Hunter did not survive that climb. She fell on that disc-shaped antenna and died.
Hunter and Becky swap roles.
After the backpack recovery sequence, there are several clues that all is not what it seems. For instance, Hunter disappears from the platform in the night. Becky awakens and cries out for her. Vultures swarm in the darkness, bringing scares before revealing Hunter’s bloody corpse on the platform. But then Becky wakes up again, and Hunter is sitting beside her. The death seems to be another of Becky’s horrific nightmares, which have plagued her since her husband plunged to his death.
A bigger clue is how Hunter dramatically changes. Initially, Hunter is the risk-taker of the two. She proposed this radio tower stunt, was the first up the ladder, took the desperate climb down, and made the terrifying leap for the backpack. But once she rejoins Becky on the platform, she’s the more cautious and level-headed one. Hunter advises they turn the low-battery drone around rather than chance losing it. She cautions Becky to eat and rest and drink the hard-won water from the retrieved backpack, but Hunter never sleeps or takes another sip herself. The first time through watching Fall, you might think Hunter is sacrificing for her friend as recompense for her betrayal, but guilt doesn’t equal superhuman endurance.
Then, there’s that last climb, where Becky must be the one to crawl the final stretch of tower to charge the drone. Hunter claims she can’t because her hands are wounded from the rope climb, but really, whether she’s providing moral support through mechanical advice or singing Warrant’s “She’s My Cherry Pie,” Hunter is only there in Becky’s mind…or maybe in spirit?
Hunter’s life hack saves Becky.
Becky’s husband and her best friend cheated together, the discovery of which adds another layer to Becky's misery. But in the end, it was their gifts that save her. The life hack that Hunter taught Becky at the diner — sticking a charging plug's prongs into a lamp socket — is how she recharges the drone. She uses her wedding band — a painful reminder of her late husband, compounded by the new knowledge of his cheating — to complete the circuit.
Of course, you could also argue that if it weren’t for Hunter and hubby, Becky wouldn’t be stuck up there in the first place.
Was Hunter a ghost or Becky’s delusion?
In 47 Meters Down, there’s a scientific explanation for why one sister firmly believed the other saw her through to safety: Nitrogen narcosis causes hallucinations. Fall doesn’t offer a concrete explanation, although some mountain climbers do report hallucinating at high altitudes, but there is one clue that you might have missed.
Waiting for the perfect moment to fly her SOS note via drone to the motel, Becky is fading fast. Hunter doesn’t reach out to hold her steady on the platform. Instead, she asks her to talk about wrestling, something Becky and her dad love. When Becky falters on the name of a wrestler, Hunter coolly provides it. Becky says softly, “Wait, I thought you said you didn’t watch it.” Hunter responds, “I didn’t.” So how did she know the name? Because she’s not Hunter. She’s the imaginary friend that Becky needs at this moment — someone who cheers her on, pushes her forward, remains hopeful and always on her side.
Hunter’s final gift was her body.
In a cruel callback to the first act, the recharged drone soars to the motel with its SOS note and then — boom — gets crushed by a truck, like Hunter and Becky almost did when they first pulled out of the parking lot in act one.
There’s only one option left: to try once more to send a message by dropping a phone to the ground, where there's a signal. A sneaker with a padded bra wasn’t enough to buffer the blow the first time, but as Becky proposes they try it again with Hunter’s remaining red sneaker, reality crashes in when Hunter explains her shoe is “down there.”
“I’m down there, remember?” Hunter says, turning her head and revealing a gory head wound. In a flashback, we see what really happened during Hunter's MacGyver moment. “I bled out,” she says dryly, before snarking, “You didn’t really think your scrawny ass could pull me up, did you?”
Down there she is, on the microwave antenna, her head bleeding. Her eyes wide and vacant. Her belly opened by the brutal beaks of vultures. All there is left to do is for Becky to crawl down and send one final message. To make sure the phone isn’t crushed on impact, she sends it down safely encased in the corpse of her best friend. That is, after she throttles a vulture and eats its meat raw for a bit of nourishment and revenge.
Some things about Fall are pretty predictable, but we bet you didn’t see that coming. And props to Becky, who has the pole prowess of an exotic dancer and the fighting spirit of a professional wrestler; her final bid for rescue works. In the end, she's back on the ground, alive and cradled in the loving arms of her burly dad. It's as happy an ending as Fall was ever going to drop.
Fall is now in theaters.
