Where I Watched It: iTunes

English Audio Description Provided By: Deluxe

Narrated By: Nicole Sansorella

It could be a controversial statement to say that Fall is not for the blind. i mean, we do have accessibility here, and Nicole Sansorella and the team at Deluxe are working overtime to make this make sense, but Fall just doesn’t work.

To be honest, this limited location thriller concept has worked better in the past. Granted, every single version of this i can come up with, I was able to see. The Shallows really stands out to me as creating high stakes, and getting the most out of its lead actress. Fall runs into the new problem of making us afraid of heights we cannot see. Aside from Nicole breaking in and just stating “look, they’re like really fucking high in the air, OK?”, the part about being able to capture the vertigo many experience from being high in the air, or that fear of falling, is somewhat hard to pass along. I have that fear, Fall probably would have made me extremely uncomfortable a few years ago. But listening to it? No.

I also didn’t think there was much story here. Films like this always have to remember they are living on borrowed time. Even the best of the films make good use of the tightness and urgency by running the film close to the clock, meaning a short runtime. They are acutely aware of their limited potential, and even though Fall has quite an unnecessary prologue to it to create backstory we really don’t need, to flesh out two characters we get to know well because they’re basically the only two in the film, has very little to offer. Two girls climb a ladder, it breaks, and the irony of being on a defunct cell phone tower with no cell phone reception hits us.

I thought the acting was fine, and though these two have expert climbing skills, there was something about the lack of wind whipping into their microphones that let me know this was all a little silly. i mean, if the director of The Eternal Daughter can have a breeze blowing through an indoor set, we should have experienced more gusts.

Once you get over the initial wow factor of what the premise is suggesting, it just becomes another derivative version of a tale as old as time. Instead of going 47 Meters Down we just went up instead. The remainder of the film is just a series of ideas to try and get out of this situation, and you understand that at least the bad ideas are done out of desperation.

it probably cost next to nothing to make this, and it did well enough at the box office to be a hit. Please no sequel. No one watched that 47 Meters Down sequel. Learn from that.

Final Grade: C