Acrophobic thriller 'Fall' is a high

Features editor

Virginia Gardner plays a woman trapped on a 2,000-foot tower in the thriller "Fall."

The important message of "Fall" is that friends shouldn't pressure other friends to get high.

I don't mean high on drugs. I mean 2,000 feet high in the air, on top of a rickety tower with no way down.

That's the irresistible premise of "Fall," one of those great lower-budget, under-the-radar movies that sometimes get released in theaters in slow months like August with little fanfare, but are much better than you would expect. With vertigo-inducing stunts and strong performances, "Fall" is a thriller for most of us but a horror movie for acrophobics. It's now playing at Marcus Point and Marcus Palace.

Becky (Grace Caroline Currey of "Shazam") and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) are thrill-seeking best friends whose adventures together end tragically when Becky's husband Dan (Mason Gooding) dies while the three are mountain climbing.

Fast forward a year later, and Becky is still numb with grief, while Hunter has become a daredevil social media influencer, of the sort who films TikToks while hanging off of the sides of cliffs. She cajoles Becky to come along on her latest escapade, climbing the 2,049-foot B67 radio tower in the California desert. Based on an actual operating broadcast tower — one of the 10 highest human-made structures in the world — in the film, the tower is a rusty, abandoned relic.

As Becky and Hunter make their way up the skinny ladder that runs to the top of the tower, we can see how rickety the tower is, with loose bolts rattling and weakened metal supports groaning in the high winds. (The sound design in these moments is effectively scary.) The duo make it to the platform at the summit and celebrate — but then the ladder gives way, stranding them on top of a smooth pole that's twice as high as the Eiffel Tower.

The movie packs in one nail-biting suspense sequence after another, as Becky and Hunter try various ways to signal for help while braving the elements, the unstable structure, even a nosy vulture or two. I was expecting a lot of computer-generated visual effects, but "Fall" looks frighteningly authentic, using the stunt team who worked on the Dubai sequence of "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol."

This is the sort of movie that might focus on action and skimp on the characters, but Currey and Gardner are completely convincing in their performances, and the screenplay by director Scott Mann and co-writer Jonathan Frank never treats Becky and Hunter as one-dimensional stereotypes. It would be easy to make the Instagram-obsessed Hunter a superficial villain, for example, but both women are smart, strong and resilient.

One of the twists late in the film was too silly for me to swallow, but otherwise "Fall" is a welcome late summer surprise, ideal for seeing with a crowd on a big screen. You’ll be sorry it's over, but happy to be back on the ground.

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Three stars

Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner

PG-13 for violence and language

1 hour 47 minutes

Now playing at Marcus Point and Marcus Palace.

Features editor

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