FALL II: DEADPOINT
2026
Directed by Peter Spierig and Michael Spierig
Written by Jonathan Frank and Scott Mann
Fall, Scott Mann's 2022 sleeper hit that I, at least, did not sleep on, was pretty great. Some of this was despite itself: it is a film that rips off not one but two previous survival thrillers with its grandiosely bullshit third act twist, revealing that one of its two principals has been dead for a solid third of the runtime and she's been nothing more than a cheerleader inside the other, surviving principal's head for exactly that long. (In also ripping off another survival genre-adjacent film with a predominantly-female cast, something possibly prompted by having a thesaurus open when Mann was naming his movie, the twist is at least sufficiently humane that the surviving principal is never suggested to have murdered her friend for banging her husband, yet—not to spoil Fall's sequel—maybe suspicions that she did shall be the basis for the second Fall sequel that is theoretically entering production, a sequel for which this movie baits a hook, though given the number of people I'm aware of who have publicly mentioned Fall since its sleeper hit heyday number "one, me, and that's it," I'm not tremendously sanguine it'll happen.) Anyway, it was also pretty great by being pretty great, not least thanks to the kind of clever physical production that I didn't even realize was available to low-budget filmmakers anymore in the 2020s. Thus I sound like an idiot in that 2022 review, going on about how confoundingly good Fall's compositing was—somehow the pretty bad CGI didn't tip me off—and, yeah, the movie looks "good" because reality looks good, Mann building his tower set overlooking an actual cliff, so my insinuations that it was the best Volume movie of all time can be safely set aside though my insistence that it had some of the very best photography of 2022 has, I think, all the more force to it. That's a reason why it was great. Another runs parallel to it: it's a truly nasty, visceral thriller, that's using its innate aesthetic qualities and the aesthetic qualities of its location to get at apocalyptic doom even before those nasty, visceral thrills, involving two women trapped 2000 feet up in a literally carnivorous sky, begin in earnest. So two reasons.
But maybe the reason was that phantom principal herself, Hunter, played by Virginia Gardner, a flamboyant adrenaline-junkie Internet-outrage-farming borderline personality dream girl who consumed Fall so thoroughly she didn't leave a ton of it left for her co-star the actual protagonist, and she died as she lived, a dumb bitch; but she'd take that as a compliment. She was one of the great unsung genre characters of the 20s, brought to life by one of the great unsung genre performances of the same. (This is, in fact, going to remain true in the sequel, which is not a compliment to it.) She was inspirational. She was not aspirational. She did, after all, fall her ass off a 2000 foot tower in the sky.
Fall II: Deadpoint—the (excellent!) animated title card aggressively uses "II," not "2," so fuck you, movie databases; "Deadpoint," meanwhile, is merely a spurious x-treme nugget attached to it—had a couple of sequelization options available, and it sort of, forgive me, tumbles down straight between them. The first, which I would've been most eager for, was to do Airport: an anthology franchise that's always about the same thing, in that case airplanes in trouble and in this case people on tall things who can't get down, but with new characters facing disaster each time. The second was to continue "the story" of Fall and, accordingly, Die Hard 2 (or Speed 2) it, continuing to put Grace Caroline Currey's revitalized Becky on top of towers, mountains, perhaps zeppelins, whatever works, even if it's going to get sort of stupid that this cursed woman continues to try rising above sea level. Fall II's screenwriters, Mann (also producing, but not returning to direct, which feels like a bad sign*) and Jonathan Frank, split the difference: Fall II continues Fall's story through Hunter's little sister, Jax (Harriet Slater), which means that, because it was already established by an easy-to-miss background line in the first film that "Hunter" was Gardner's character's surname, she will be referred to throughout this film by her given name, Shiloh. This is, obviously, a strike against it.
Jax (and that at least works right: I wish I could tell you it was actually short for "Jackson," just to make it the supreme White Girl Name, rather than just a good example) is grieving her sister, and into the midst of this grief arrives Luce (Arsema Thomas), a friend of "Shy's" who, upon their mutual discovery of Shiloh's serial killeresque notebook full of plans for further dangerous climbs, inveigles Jax into completing Shiloh's legacy of death-defiance. Despite appearing impoverished (she's crashing on somebody's couch), a flight to Thailand is evidently not beyond Jax's means, and off they go to conquer Mt. Kwan, specifically to "walk the plank," a series of, well, planks placed there "centuries" ago (sure**) around the sharp edges of this angular protrusion on the Burmese border, where there's promised a (metaphorical) dragon that will eat your fears. The route hasn't been legal for decades, so they dig up shady expat guide Jon (Tom Brittney). Things go about as well as you'd expect, especially given the brief illustrative prologue we've already seen, involving a man being forced by another man to walk this selfsame plank at gunpoint, which concluded with a small earthquake and a big rockslide that killed them both. Jon likewise eats it, and it will not surprise you to learn that Jax and Luce get trapped on a small section of platform ~2000 feet up in the air. Okay, I don't know that it had to be that exact.
And really, that's one of Fall II's problems. What you think I'm going to say is that it's simultaneously an extremely exact copy of the first Fall, and a sequel to Fall where its differences make it seem like it doesn't understand why the first Fall worked; and, you know, it's a worthwhile first approximation as to why Fall II doesn't, though I'm not sure that's the underlying or at least the only underlying problem. Honestly? I don't believe Mann and Frank actually wanted to copy Fall; I think they had a brand new idea that they just couldn't figure out, which at length Fall II seemingly confirms, when its third act introduces into this franchise the dissonant concept of human villainy, turning a survival thriller into a regular thriller that happens to be in a survival thriller's setting. It's as good an idea as any, but how do you "do Fall," which is all about the constrained options of a small number of people, classically "two," trapped in a high place, while also employing the cat-and-mouse tactics demanded by a regular thriller? Let's break that down into the fundamental writing challenge these writers couldn't crack: how in the world do you have two women get chased by violent enemies over an effectively one-dimensional obstacle course that also collapses behind them? Putting it like that, I sympathize.***
So I don't have any really harsh things to say about the structural hiccups this occasions, which I guess it handles as well as this writing team could, even if I feel in my gut there were obvious ways it could've done it better. Hey, at least Fall II doesn't take recourse to a ghost. (But then, I wonder if the criticism of Fall's twist has resulted in Fall II doing the opposite of a ghost, and somehow winding up with the exact same damn "if you just fucking told us, it would've been more interesting!" problem the first one had. There's also a minor twist that should've been met with complete indifference.) It does not, however, really excuse any of the other issues, like how this movie takes a while to spin itself up, so at 97 minutes it manages to feel longer than Fall despite being ten minutes shorter. Some of those 97 minutes are eaten up by the "previously on" montage that hits us after the prologue (which includes a lot of real Internet people reacting to Hunter's death, and I really don't find this the aptest place for a Goddamn manosphere jumpscare). A surprising amount will be eaten up later by the movie's least-effective conceit, a shockingly powerful and visible laser pointer (hell if it's a practical laser, but it isn't, right?), that recapitulates the "they almost got help, but chose the wrong people to make contact with" beat from Fall without the savage sourness that made it function there. A miserable amount is eaten up by a first act that exists to effortfully establish Jax's forlornness and probably winds up counterproductive, offering us her resentments towards her sister, some of which are credible and some of which are definitely not. (They try to make hay of the fact that Jax's elder sister spent more time with her peer best friend Becky, and... so? I like the flashback-nightmare skydiving incident between the siblings, which gives us another hit of that delectable Shiloh Hunter awfulness, until its conclusion, where a "punch in the face" ought to write itself, but doesn't.)
Remarkably, one thing they fail the fuck out of establishing is that Jax is an experienced, capable climber. I guess she has to be for this to make even provisional sense, but there is absolutely no reason to believe she should be, when she didn't hang out much with Shiloh and she's explicitly terrified of heights, while Slater, I'm afraid, is not automatically persuading you otherwise. Some of this is costuming: the jacket she wears for almost the entire movie diminishes her physicality to a striking degree, but it's also the case that I'm not sure she does a full on-camera pull-up the entire film, and Slater, 32, may nevertheless have a long future ahead of her being cast as the "younger" fill-in-the-blank to somebody else, which of course is precisely how she's been cast here; she and Thomas are some distance away from Gardner and Currey's titan, "that-wasn't-a-stunt-double?" performances previously, though this impression also isn't their fault. We're tacking into "direction" now, but let's put a pin in that.
For, of course, this is close to petty bullshit: Keanu Reeves would be a wheezing bloodstain by his third henchman, and there is such a thing as suspension of disbelief. What sucks, then, is that this is astoundingly lazy about filling in that Fall template—sadsack needs to climb ridiculously hazardous thing to get over loss of loved one, you say?—and what sucks quite a bit worse, since, after all, we did come to see that spectacle even if we'd prefer it to be more creatively-motivated, is that the "innovation" to the character interactions of Fall II is two sadsacks. There's modulation (Jax is far more openly sullen), but this makes the lead-up much less investing, because nobody is replacing Gardner's dynamo (or, for that matter, Currey's suicidal despair). What sucks worst, though, is the movie realizing this, and the perverse way it goes about "fixing" it: there is a bluntly-written scene before they begin their ascent, regarding a goofy bucket hat, which Luce insists isn't very "Shiloh," and Jax replies she's not Shiloh, but we wait with Jax for a long moment until she decides to leave that bucket hat behind. This promises—with all the inordinate grace it sounds like—what arc-like object we're going to be getting, and instead of the potentially-captivating drama of this climber with this temperament facing the same problems her sister did, but solving them her way, what Fall II is going to be about is recreating Jax's dead sister as hollow pastiche, without the slightest comprehension that what was interesting and vital about her crazy-ass sister was not "hatlessness" and definitely not the way she wore her fucking hair, but a personality and verve that Slater has been tasked with doing the total opposite of, so that Slater's strongest actorly contribution is just the dully-proficient technical work of integrating subtle mimickry of Gardner's mannerisms in preparation for becoming her sister's reborn, grimboring, side-braided avatar.
Now, perhaps it's naive of me to be disappointed in Fall II's character drama, and it does, indeed, pick up substantially once they finally (it's probably "twenty minutes in" but it feels like a "finally") start making their way up Mt. Kwan. The rock itself is a nice piece of design, this Brutalistically-simple (and geologically-suspect) rectangle of rock bursting out of the Thai highlands; details on the production of Fall II are spotty, and I don't wish to embarrass myself again, but to venture a guess what we're looking at is drone location footage of Thailand and composited set elements, possibly including some measure of the same production methods used in Fall. But I'd suspect that's been minimized, that Fall II had a higher budget, and we're seeing far more compositing. (Though some of it looks convincing enough I'll credit the movie for stand-ins in extreme long shots of lower-lying landscapes.) This one was directed by the Spierig Brothers, and I think I can rightfully feel disappointed in that, since that was one of the things I was excited about; though now I'm not exactly sure why. I mean, obviously it's because I think of the Spierigs as good directors because they have, in my experience, made good movies: Daybreakers has its problems but that premise powers through, Predestination is genuinely fantastic, and, hell, I've heard good things about Jigsaw and you just do not "hear good things" about a Saw. And, probably not even excepting Jigsaw, none of those really speak to "we know how to extract experiential thrills from composited images of actors struggling on the sheer face of an impossible mountain."
The setpieces of Fall II are, for the most part, resolutely fine, and missing something important—to the side of equivalents for Gardner's and Currey's performances, I mean—that's hard to precisely name. Some of it is the stark simplicity of Fall, which shouldn't have been replicated, but even so, Fall just had that aesthetic x-factor: there was something borderline-abstract and even cosmic about Gardner and Currey against that evil-looking desert sky. (The technological nature of their summit helped, so we get the "blood red" scene. For that matter, Mt. Kwan offers no evil animals symbolizing death, either.) That starkness must've filtered into the Spierigs' vision—the blocklike mountain and our heroines' specific stretch of mountainside being two cliffs meeting at a razor-sharp point, often a thin slice of smooth terra firma occupying a small fraction of the frame while the sky occupies the rest; the crappy ladder up to the plank is appreciably "evil"—but they just didn't know quite what to do with it. (Could it be too much horizon, too often?)
I think this is objectively true in their shot scales: they are dutifully giving vertiginous shots downward and establishing shots establishing the landscape's enormity, and sometimes they really mix things up; the most effective thing in the movie is, perhaps, a crazily-spinning camera that swings all around and upside down against Slater's face while Jax's pectorals are separating trying to hold onto Luce, and the finale-of-the-first-movie-before-the-second-other-movie-starts invokes a nice piece of emptied-framed iconicism, shot from what would "need" to be "inside" the mountain in order to put Slater, and only Slater, fully in the frame, intent on defying a fiercely-felt gravity. But you could also say "finally" about that: the modal shot of Slater doing things is a medium close-up where for all I know she was absolutely suspending herself with own bodily strength, but she could be standing on a stepladder. (A few of these essentially amount to a close-up of Slater's armpits, and apparently Jax brought her Bic Soleil up with her to possibly die on this Goddamn mountain. And I mention this in part because, Jesus, our society needs to grow up, but also because it's important: the first Fall (probably) didn't do axillary realism itself—it also didn't literally shove your face in it—yet it was also hugely invested in the disintegration of Gardner and Currey's manicured appearances, to the point that it got silly in the other direction—by hour 48, makeup is just gone, not still in fragments all over your face—but it was great visual shorthand.)
And eventually it has to get to the novelty material of that whole second, "human villainy" phase, which it doesn't have any time for, as is made manifestly clear by the bizarre nuance it's trying to give the antagonism, that might've played in a thriller that wasn't five minutes long. This sequence is the other place that could make claim to having the movie's "most effective" gesture, a great piece of sound design concerning metal cables vibrating with unbelievable tension and pushed extraordinarily high up into the mix, so naturally it's in the movie for a single-digit number of seconds. Those cables belong to the world's most absurdly unusable bridge, spanning a bottomless gulf, and once again Mann and Frank (now we have to include the Spierigs too) were presented with a challenge: how do you stage action in such a precarious setting? Well, I don't know, have you really never seen Temple of Doom? I mean, I'll take The Phantom. It is, ultimately, a watchable film, but weak, even joyless. It didn't need more Hunter, but it needed something like her, somewhere in its creation.
Score: 5/10
*Mann's AI patents, and the fact that he used what I'd really, really prefer to just call "CGI" back in 2022 to PG-13ize Gardner's swear-heavy dialogue in Fall, also makes me itch a bit.
**An amped-up and ill-maintained fantasia of the famous plank walk on China's Huashan, aka Number One Steepest Mountain Under Heaven.
***Fall being capable of being described, geometrically, using no dimensions, it's miracle it does work.
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