The images on screen of perilous mountain cliffs are perfectly framed for IMAX screens – which are currently mostly occupied by Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The handful of people populating these images, meanwhile, wouldn’t crack that movie’s top 20 most recognizable stars. It’s a big-screen spectacle that’s also a green-screened sequel to a movie that really made its name on streaming. Welcome to Fall 2: Deadpoint, the year’s most potent fusion of pure cinema and absolute junk.
The original Fall was an unusual success story. A low-budget indie about two women who get stuck at the top of a radio tower and must figure out how to find help and save themselves – sort of an open-air, shark-free variation on the similar surprise hit 47 Meters Down – it was released in theaters in 2022 after Lionsgate acquired it and found positive audience responses at test screenings. With frugal promotion and no stars, the movie became a modest worldwide hit, despite its inability to secure the IMAX screens where its filmmakers at one point hoped it might play. (Variety referred to the movie as being shot with “large-format cameras,” although it’s unclear what, exactly, this means, as it was not shot with IMAX equipment.) When it hit Netflix, it had a second wave of viewers that propelled it up that service’s charts. By this point, Fall 2 was already greenlit; it hits theaters over Labor Day weekend, the perfect time for another modestly cast and intimately set, and yet, from a certain perspective, enormous-scope thriller.
Though it would be easy enough to replicate the Fall formula without a formal connection to the original film, Fall 2: Deadpoint does quite the opposite, digging into character-based lore. The reason may be creative, or it may be strategic. Given that it’s a horror-adjacent release from Lionsgate, and that studio’s signature Saw franchise has been on ice due to creative squabbles since the success of Saw X, it feels almost like an attempt to engineer a gore-light replacement for those movies. Fall 2 even recruits the Spierig Brothers, horror vets who oversaw the (unsuccessful) 2017 Saw semi-reboot Jigsaw, to direct in place of original filmmaker Scott Mann (who returns to co-write – much like writer Leigh Whannell and producer James Wan stuck with the Saw series for a few entries after Wan directed and Whannell wrote the first one).
Fall 2 follows Jax (Harriet Slater), surviving sister of Shiloh (Virginia Gardner), one of the girls who got stuck in the original Fall. Despondent following her sister’s untimely death, Jax meets Luce (Arsema Thomas), an old friend of Shiloh’s, who convinces her to embark on a crazy mission: In tribute to her sister, why not go on one of the adventures she planned but never executed? This entails traveling to Thailand with a near-stranger to hike an illegal, barely-there mountainside trail that can only be traversed with an artificial pathway, a guide, and careful application of anchors. Naturally, Jax says yes. Throughout the movie, she meets far-flung and sometimes life-and-death dilemmas with a reluctance that more closely suggests not wanting to get out of bed at six in the morning than, say, a young woman stuck on the jagged edge of a mountain whose creaky planked pathway has just been destroyed.
That is indeed what happens in Fall 2. Jax and Luce go up the mountain with their guide, rocks fall, and the two women get stuck in a situation that arguably (and in proper sequel fashion) seems even worse than the one from the previous film.
This means that Fall 2: Deadpoint works largely the same way as Fall, which is to say it credibly evokes the stomach-dropping feeling of apprehension anyone might feel in the situation at hand. It’s a little faker-looking; though there are location shots throughout, imitating straight-down mountainside is not as straightforward a task as the first movie, which really did shoot far above the ground (just not as far, or as unsafe, as the characters looked). Still, the Spierigs use some inventive visual techniques, like repeated POV shots that capture the experience of looking straight down in the last place you’d ever want to do that, and the movie’s old standbys – trying to snare a stranded backpack; attempting to hang on to wobbly infrastructure that itself is just barely hanging on – work wonders.
Beyond the high-wobbling basics of its survival story, Fall 2 is pure B-movie: Awkwardly phrased expositional dialogue, weirdly elaborate backstories, and signposted but still ridiculous revelations. It doesn’t dare attempt to replicate the first movie’s twist (itself knocked off from another film), but throws in some wild turns of its own that should fail to distinguish it from any number of chintzy straight-to-streaming thrillers. By most contemporary standards, especially in a summer where the biggest success stories are movies as lavish as The Odyssey, or featuring characters as beloved as Spider-Man: Brand New Day, or as bespoke in their smallness as Obsession, Fall 2 shouldn’t seem like a theatrical event. Indeed, its eye is not on grosses measured in terms of a billion. The first one was a success when it crossed the $10 million mark worldwide. On the moviegoer side of things, if you’re planning on seeing one movie for the whole month of September, you probably don’t want to make it Fall 2.
But for more frequent moviegoers, it’s really a classic case of a shlocky film elevated by the circumstances of cinema: See it at the right size, and it transforms from a guilty borderline pleasure to a stupidly satisfying night out. The trick is finding an open screen big enough.