2022 feels very recent for a Year of the Month – seems like the conversation for Everything Everywhere All at Once and Barbarian has only recently died down. But the list of options reminded me of something that might have escaped my attention at the time: it was a pretty damn good year for movies. Sandwiched between the production-compromising circumstances of the pandemic and the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes and a year before the Barbenheimer phenomenon excited the box office in the public’s minds, 2022 released a number of solid on-base hits. Nope, Aftersun, The Banshees of Inisherin, The Northman, TAR, Decision to Leave, Three Thousand Years of Longing, The Menu, The Woman King, Crimes of the Future – I haven’t gotten back around to revisiting any of these in the past two years, but they’re all on the rewatch list.
And there were a number of really great films that went under the radar. The Solute has done its due diligence promoting the pleasures of No Exit and Showing Up, but we could do better discussing Catherine Called Birdy, Sanctuary and Enys Men. But I chose to spotlight a film that I put on my top five for that year, partly out of cheeky contrarianism, and partly because it’s a film that advertises one thing then delivers on that promise. The movie is Fall and that promise is this:
The movie begins with Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) free climbing with her husband in merely the first of several dizzying sequences to come. An accident during the climb kills the husband, and Becky spirals into a year of depression. Her friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner), knowing the best way to get over somebody is to get over everybody else, suggest they climb a massive, rickety television tower several miles from anybody that could come to the rescue if, say, the ladder broke away and left you stranded on the top platform. If that poster makes your toes curl, prepare to look at it for over an hour.
Is the movie good? We must consider. Does this movie have a cardboard box helpfully labelled CREMATED REMAINS? Does everything that falls from a height make a Wile E. Coyote puff of smoke? Are there Chekhov’s vultures? Yes. And yes, it’s good. The Seventh Seal may be a richer text, but it doesn’t make me brace my legs against the floor. Vertigo doesn’t literally give me vertigo.
The movie is preposterous and entertaining in equal measure, and a solid use of low-budget special effects. There’s a reason the clock tower sequence in Safety Last still works a hundred years later; we know there’s not really a deadly amount of space below the actors or that they’re dealing with the same amount of physical exhaustion as their characters. But they still have to perform (most of) the physical actions we witness, and when all other visual and story data point to a mistake being fatal, the suspension of disbelief isn’t hard. And we know when Tom Cruise does his schtick there’s too many people depending on him for livelihood for any real danger. No disrespect to these fine actors, but it’s easier to imagine the risk calculations coming out differently.
The constant threat of danger keeps the movie moving fast enough not to get hung up on things like the women finding time to squabble over a man at 2,000 feet, or a flashback voiceover to remind the audience why it’s important to eat when you’re hungry. Fall manages to provide what you’re looking for and a bit more.
Fall can be rented at the usual outlets and seen for free (with ads) on the Roku Channel.
