Even if you don’t suffer from vertigo, there are moments in Scott Mann’s thriller Fall – the single-handed selfie snapped while dangling from a rusty grating 2,000 feet in the sky, for example – that are almost unwatchable. But for those of us who are such babies about heights that we need to steel ourselves just to climb the ladder to the loft, this is the kind of button-pushing ordeal of a movie that makes your eyeballs sweat with anxiety.
The story is simple: two female friends in search of adventure and streaming clicks climb to the top of the disused B67 TV tower in the Mojave desert, but then find themselves stuck, with no phone reception and a pair of feisty vultures eyeing them with obvious interest. The trip is framed as a catharsis; a means for Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), recently widowed after a climbing accident, to confront and conquer her fears. But frankly, those fears – of scaling a shuddering structure that is groaning with metal fatigue and ominous rattling rivets – seem perfectly reasonable and healthy.
Mann is clearly having a lot of fun backing up the visual triggers (shots of slipping fingertips clinging to rungs) with a rich aural palette of tortured iron creaks and cracks. Even so, and even with a nicely macabre third-act twist, there is quite a lot of running time to fill with two young women stranded in the sky. But while the pace falters a little – there are only so many ways you can almost fall off a tower, after all – the tension is unrelenting.
