THE STORY – After the death of Shiloh Hunter, her sister Jax agrees to a tribute proposed by Shiloh’s daring friend, Luce. The two travel to Thailand to conquer a treacherous plank walk on Mount Kwan, but a sudden rockslide leaves them trapped at a terrifying height of 3,000 feet, forcing the duo to push their limits and cooperate to stay alive.
THE CAST – Harriet Slater, Arsema Thomas & Tom Brittney
THE TEAM – The Spierig Brothers (Directors), Scott Mann & Jonathan Frank (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 97 Minutes
If nothing else, 2022’s “Fall” did a monstrously good job at making its audience feel the dizzying terror of climbing, and then being stranded, up a 2,000-ft high abandoned radio tower. Not a lot to build a whole film around, but what is cinema good for if not experiencing death-defying thrills by proxy? Four years later, the sequel, “Fall 2: Deadpoint,” doubles down on all that vertiginous excitement, stranding our intrepid adventurers 4,000 feet up the side of a mountain in Thailand. The stakes have been raised, and the length, thankfully, has been shortened. “Fall” needlessly tied itself in knots in order to push itself to 107 agonizing minutes, but directors the Spierig Brothers have blessedly kept the sequel to only 98 minutes. If you ask me (and by reading this review, that’s exactly what you have done), that’s still a touch too long for a B-movie with this simple a premise. Still, we gotta take the wins where we can, and no matter how you look at it, the shorter runtime works in the film’s favor: If, like the first film’s Shiloh (Virginia Gardner), you live for the thrill of it, the faster pace makes it all the more enjoyable, but if you’re more like her sister, Jax (Harriet Slater), and are a bit of a risk-averse scaredy cat, then I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you why a shorter length would be a good thing.
Anyway, in the years since Shiloh’s untimely demise in the first film, she went viral, forcing Jax to deal with a lot of her crazy fans/followers (or “fall-owers,” as a podcaster disbelievingly tells us) instead of grieving and moving on. Thankfully, Shiloh’s old college buddy Luce (Arsema Thomas) offered to buy her old pickup truck, which contains the last of her possessions, including her “Fuck-It List” scrapbook of all the world’s most dangerous places that she wanted to see (and conquer). Seeing how wound-up and scared Jax is, Luce coerces her into going to one of the locations on the list, as a last tribute to Shiloh the two can undertake together. Despite barely knowing each other, they jet off to Thailand to climb Mount Kwan, a climb that ends in front of a stone dragon that legends say will eat your fears.
To say that the prospect of this climb fills Jax with dread would be an understatement, but she goes anyway, using Shiloh’s code word to find a guide (Tom Brittney) willing to take them up to meet the dragon. Of course, Shiloh didn’t do anything the easy way, and her plan was not to climb the regular path, but a path so dangerous that it’s been closed to the public for years, one that involves a(nother) vertical climb up a rusty ladder followed by a precarious “plank walk” with only a chain bolted into the mountainside to hold on to. Everyone tells them this is a bad idea – it’s too dangerous even for experienced climbers; the path is now mostly used by drug runners trying to get to neighboring Malaysia; it’s the rainy season, which will make the planks slippery; if anything happens to them, they don’t even know the language to call for help – but Luce will not be deterred, and Jax won’t be left behind. Off they go, just two novice climbers and one guide climbing 4,000 feet up a rusty “ladder” and walking across ancient wooden planks. What could possibly go wrong?
It doesn’t take long to realize that this sequel’s creative team took the path of least resistance towards writing it. “Deadpoint” follows the exact same structure as “Fall,” although returning writers Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank thankfully have the tact to not try to pull the same tasteless trick they did with the last film’s ending. While much of this film’s plot is incredibly stupid, it never reaches the level of offensiveness that the first film did with its downright unpleasant last act. Mann and Frank have learned enough from their mistakes to know that keeping things simple is best, but the need for a sequel to raise the stakes gets in their way a little, as the last act adds a more human kind of danger that isn’t nearly as effective as that on the mountain face.
Everything about this situation is more perilous than that of the first film, and the Spierigs know that the film’s real star isn’t an actor, but the view. Even when you can tell that the cast is on a set and not actually on the side of a mountain, the POV shots of Jax’s feet on those wooden planks remain ridiculously effective, and not just for those of us with a fear of heights, it’s the best trick that cinematographer Andrew Strahorn pulls on his own, as he mostly sticks to the playbook set by the first film, with lots of nerve-shredding close-up insert shots of loosening screws and crumbling rocks to heighten the suspense alongside some stunning wide shots of the landscape. As with the first film, the basic mechanics of making the audience feel the stress and danger of the situation work fantastically, and everything else is purely functional. The characters are more like collections of tropes, but they have arcs, and there’s no muddled messaging. The ADR is appallingly bad, but the sound work during the climbing scenes does its part to contribute to the overall effect. Everything surrounding the film’s survival-thriller core is passable at best, but that core is rock-solid. If all you want is a film that will stress you out as you watch other people risk their lives for your entertainment, look no further than “Fall 2”. If you care more about interesting characters and deep thematic resonance, well, awards season is just around the corner.
