‘Fall 2: Deadpoint’ Review: An Exhausting Climb to Nowhere

Summer 2022 was a strange time. Restaurants and bars were no longer checking for proof of vaccination, and masks in public spaces were (mostly) optional. I had just finished grad school and found myself with a lot of time on my hands, which I spent applying for jobs and watching movies while waiting for responses. Because of the pandemic, most of these movies had been shuffled off to streaming and VOD. But others, like Scott Mann’s Fall, which premiered in August 2022, were being positioned as the kind of theatrical experience worth leaving the house for. 

The psychological survival thriller delivered on its promise – it made $21.8 million on a $3 million budget– but with a story this bonkers, how could it not? Thrill seeker Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and her best friend, up-and-coming YouTuber Shiloh Hunter (Virginia Gardner), climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower in the middle of the Mojave Desert in an effort to find closure after the death of Becky’s husband, Dan (Mason Gooding), during one of their excursions a year prior. As Murphy’s Law suggests, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and the girls are stranded on the tower, dehydrated with dwindling supplies and zero cell service. Becky lives and Shiloh dies while trying to retrieve their backpack. 

Four years later, it’s hardly surprising that Fall has received the sequel treatment. What is surprising, though, is how little Fall 2: Deadpoint seems to understand about what made its predecessor work in the first place, even if it hits some familiar beats. 

Written by Mann and Fall co-writer Jonathan Frank and directed by the Spierig Brothers (Jigsaw, Winchester), Fall 2: Deadpoint introduces us to Jax (Harriet Slater), Shiloh’s timid little sister who has been thrust into the spotlight now that Shiloh has been turned into a martyr of sorts amongst true crime fans and other thrill seekers (her “fall-owers”). While selling the last of her belongings, Jax meets Shiloh’s college friend, Luce (Arsema Thomas), who suggests over a glass of “Jim Dandie’s” that they should honor her legacy by going on an illegal plank-walk on the side of a mountain in Thailand that will lead them to a spiritual, fear-eating statue the locals call the Death Dragon.