The vertigo-inducing shots of sheer mountain faces look tailor-made for IMAX — those giant screens currently dominated, for the most part, by Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The people clinging to those cliffs, however, are hardly the sort of marquee names who would rank among that film’s 20 most identifiable stars. That contrast is the strange appeal of Fall 2: Deadpoint: a big-screen survival thriller built from streaming-era scraps, a green-screened sequel to a movie that found much of its audience at home. It may be the year’s most effective collision of old-fashioned cinematic spectacle and unapologetic trash.
The first Fall became a hit in a way few low-budget thrillers do anymore. The indie film, centered on two women stranded atop a remote radio tower as they desperately try to call for help and stay alive, played like an open-air, shark-free cousin to the sleeper success 47 Meters Down. Lionsgate picked it up and gave it a theatrical release in 2022 after test audiences responded well. With little in the way of marketing muscle and no major stars to sell it, Fall still managed to become a modest global box office success, even though it never landed the IMAX screens its filmmakers had once hoped for. Variety described the movie as having been shot with “large-format cameras,” though what that meant in practice remains somewhat unclear, since it was not filmed with IMAX equipment. Then Netflix gave it a second life, pushing it up the streamer’s charts and introducing it to a wider audience. By then, Fall 2 had already been approved, and it arrives in theaters over Labor Day weekend — a fitting slot for another compact, modestly cast thriller that nevertheless aims for a surprisingly massive sense of scale.
It would have been simple enough for Fall 2: Deadpoint to recycle the original movie’s premise without tying itself too closely to what came before. Instead, the sequel leans into continuity and character mythology. That choice may come from creative ambition, or it may be a shrewd bit of franchise-building. As a Lionsgate release that sits close to horror without fully committing to gore, the film almost feels positioned as a lighter substitute for the studio’s signature Saw series, which has been stalled by creative disputes since the success of Saw X. The connection is strengthened by the hiring of the Spierig Brothers, genre veterans who directed the unsuccessful 2017 Saw semi-reboot Jigsaw. They take over from original director Scott Mann, who remains involved as a co-writer — a handoff that recalls the early Saw years, when writer Leigh Whannell and producer James Wan stayed with the franchise for several installments after Wan directed and Whannell wrote the first film.
Fall 2 centers on Jax (Harriet Slater), the grieving sister of Shiloh (Virginia Gardner), one of the women trapped in the original Fall. Still reeling from Shiloh’s sudden death, Jax crosses paths with Luce (Arsema Thomas), an old friend of her sister’s, who proposes a wildly risky tribute: complete one of the adventures Shiloh dreamed about but never got to attempt. That plan sends Jax to Thailand with someone she barely knows, bound for an illegal and dangerously fragile mountainside trail that requires an artificial walkway, a guide, and precisely placed anchors to navigate. Naturally, she agrees. As the trip escalates from reckless memorial to full-blown survival nightmare, Jax responds to far-flung, life-or-death crises with a reluctance that often feels less like terror on the edge of a jagged cliff and more like someone being asked to get out of bed at 6 a.m. — even after the rickety plank path beneath her has 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.