There are some movies that can have you holding onto your armrest for balance. Fall, on the other hand, makes all those other films look like child’s play.
Directed by Scott Mann, it’s a survival drama focusing on Becky (played by Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), two best friends who decide to embark upon a daring challenge after Becky’s husband dies in a climbing accident.
Their goal is to climb a 2,000 feet abandoned radio tower and then make it back to the ground safely. However, an unreliable screw causes the ladder they used to fall far down below and they’re left stranded at the top desperate to communicate their distress.
Do they make it out alive?
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS
- RINGS OF POWER:EPISODE 3 RELEASE DATE
Fall movie ending explained
The pair’s best chance of survival is retrieving a backpack that contains a drone and water.
With no service on their phones and a failed attempt to drop one to the ground to get signal, Hunter decides to rope down to the dish antenna below them where the backpack is.
She gets down to it and unhooks herself from the rope. However, she must now jump up to grab the rope and ask Becky to pull her back up. Rife with tension, this is what happens but their attempts to use a drone are unsuccessful.
The first time it runs out of charge and on the second attempt it’s hit by a vehicle.
Becky suggests putting the second phone in another of Hunter’s shoes but she explains that it’s not possible. Here comes the reveal…
Hunter never actually came back up to the platform after getting the bag and she has been a hallucination of Becky’s since then. Her dead body is shown on the dish antenna and it’s implied that Becky has imagined her friend is still alive after pulling up the backpack as a way to cope with the horrific situation.
Becky then uses the rope to travel down to the antenna herself and she puts her phone inside Hunter’s shoe and then forces it into a wound of the deceased’s body and pushes it down to the ground.
The hope is that her body will cushion the fall and the phone will survive. Now with signal, the text message to her father alerting him of her whereabouts should send.
We conclude with her father flocking to the scene to find paramedics, officials, and his daughter alive at ground level.
Take your fear of heights to a whole new level. FALL is now playing only in theaters. pic.twitter.com/5dhe6dqn5j
— Fall (@FallMovie) August 18, 2022
THEORY: Becky actually dies
Although the ending can confirm that Becky survives, another way to interpret it is that she died just like Hunter.
After all, that aforementioned reveal has taught us that we can’t necessarily believe what we’re seeing on screen. It’s possible that Becky died attempting to do the very same thing Hunter did, travelling down to the dish.
Her rescue could be yet another hopeful fantasy playing out in her head after she falls to the antenna.
Alternatively, perhaps she didn’t attempt to travel down to it at all and the rescue was a hallucination from the very top as she succumbs to total exhaustion.
- NO WAY HOME:NEW POST-CREDIT SCENE EXPLAINED
‘Heights hasn’t really been done fully in a film yet’
Scott recently opened up about what inspired him to make Fall during a conversation with Movieweb:
“The inspiration was personally being scared of heights, like a lot of people I think. It actually started when myself and Jonathan Frank, the co-writer, were shooting a sequence for another movie in London on top of a football stadium.”
He continued: “… even though we were getting a spectacle for the movie, it was actually where we stood on this kind of small space looking straight down that I remember thinking, ‘heights hasn’t really been done fully in a film yet.’ There’s never been something purely focused on that fear…”
