Fall 2 — Deadpoint

Fall 2: full review

In 2022, Fall proved that with three million dollars, two actresses and a 2,000-foot communications tower you could make one of the most nerve-racking films of the decade. It wasn't exactly good, but you needed a very strong stomach to watch it without gripping the armrest, and its run on Netflix turned it into a small phenomenon. Fall 2: Deadpoint arrives with the same ridiculous budget, a change of scenery and the promise of more height, more danger and more drama. It delivers on the first two. With the third, it overdoes it.

The protagonist is now Jax Hunter (Harriet Slater), the younger sister of Shiloh, the climbing YouTuber whose death in the first film is still an open wound. Jax meets Luce (Arsema Thomas), who claims to have been her sister's friend, when she goes to sell Shiloh's truck. Inside turns up a scrapbook of the challenges Shiloh never got to do, and Luce persuades Jax to complete one of them: a plank walk bolted to the face of Mount Kwan in Thailand, which is officially closed. Jon (Tom Brittney) guides them. A rockslide separates them from the guide and leaves them trapped on a stretch of planks known as the Devil's Elbow, where they can neither go forward nor back.

Low-budget vertigo, but vertigo

This time the directors are brothers Peter and Michael Spierig, the Australians behind Daybreakers, Predestination and Jigsaw, while Scott Mann, who directed the first film, stays on as writer and producer (and is already preparing the third). The Spierigs know what audiences come for and deliver it from the first high-altitude shot: cameras dangling over the void, creaking planks, carabiners that don't quite click. The sense of vertigo is very well achieved, and on a big screen there are moments that are hard to watch. It's fairground cinema in the best sense: a physical exercise you experience with your body before your head.

The shoot took place in Thailand, and the mountain has a real presence a green screen never achieves. When the film sticks to two women hanging over a precipice, with the sun, thirst and exhaustion as enemies, it works the way the first one did.

Too much drama for so little plank

The problem is that Fall 2 isn't content with that. Mann and Jonathan Frank wanted to give the story more layers, and the layers end up turning into soap-opera twists. The film piles up revelations about Luce, about her relationship with Shiloh and about the true intentions of some characters that we won't reveal here, but that make the last third feel like another film: less vertigo and more afternoon-TV crime thriller. The consensus of American critics summed it up well: the film raises the stakes without making its characters proportionally smarter. Some decisions generate more tension through their absurdity than their danger.

Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas hold up with dignity, and Slater in particular makes believable the fear of a girl who never wanted to climb and is forced to confront her sister's memory while hanging over the void. Grief as the story's engine is the most interesting thing about the film, and when it focuses on it there are moments of real emotion. But the script doesn't trust that simplicity and loads so many ornaments on top that it ends up losing its balance, like its protagonists.

Modest box office, perfect business

Fall 2 cost around three million dollars and has grossed more than 26 worldwide, almost all of it outside the US, so the third instalment is guaranteed (the ending makes no secret of announcing it). Critics were lukewarm, with 53% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and audiences gave it a B− CinemaScore, a notch below the first. It makes sense: the novelty of the concept is gone and what remains is a formula that needs more than height to hold up.

The best

• The vertigo: the Spierigs make every high-altitude shot genuinely frightening.
• Harriet Slater: she turns the fear of heights into the fear of facing grief.
• The economy of means: three million dollars well spent on every plank.

The worst

• The plot twists: the last third turns into an afternoon-TV thriller.
• The characters: they make decisions that exist only to stretch the film out.
• The exhausted formula: without the surprise of the first, height isn't enough.

The Claqueta Ácida Verdict

Fall 2: Deadpoint is a sequel that understands perfectly what worked in the original, the physical vertigo, the anguish of the void, the simplicity of two people trapped, and insists on ruining it with twists nobody asked for. When the protagonists are hanging over the mountain, the film is scary. When the script starts playing soap opera, it's cringeworthy. We give it a 5: a bare pass, earned at altitude and lost on solid ground. If you suffer from vertigo, stay away. If you're allergic to soap-opera twists, same. 🧗