Fall (2022)

Fall is Frozen in the desert. Instead of three friends stuck on a malfunctioning ski lift in the dead of winter, two hot babes are stranded on top of a 2000-foot TV tower in the hot sun. Whereas the trio in Frozen are genuinely forgotten victims caught in an unfortunate dilemma while on vacation, the women in Fall have no one to blame but themselves. To put it bluntly, if this was real, their story would be prominently featured on Ridiculousness.

We first meet them on a mountain climb. Adventurous Hunter (Reese Witherspoon doppelganger Virginia Gardner) is the buxom, free-spirited blonde YouTuber afraid of nothing. Her best friend Becky (Grace Caroline Currey who looks like the love child of PJ Harvey and Sally Hawkins) is the more reluctant brunette who needs to be talked into doing something risky like this. Clearly, she would never come up with any of this on her own.

Along for the ride is Becky’s equally fearless husband Daniel (latter-day Scream alumnus Mason Gooding). It does not take you long to predict what will happen to him. I just wish it was more jolting. The scene is crucial in establishing what will happen next. Beautiful scenery and expertly maneuvered cinematography aside, the expected pay-off is rather underwhelming. We barely know these people.

Nearly a year later, Becky remains in deep mourning, drowning herself in booze and popping those anti-depressants like Tic Tacs. Daniel’s remains are in her custody which she clings to like the holy grail. Desperate to hear his voice, she calls his cell just to hear his jokey outgoing voicemail message until it’s finally disconnected at the worst possible time.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays her deeply concerned father. They once had a strong bond over pro wrestling (he has a Stone Cold Steve Austin bobblehead on the dashboard of his car and his ringtone is the old Legion Of Doom entrance theme that I didn’t realize was co-written by Jimmy Hart), but are now as distant as Peter Hook and New Order.

He keeps calling, she never picks up. Isolated from everyone, he finds her, probably not for the first time, coming out of a watering hole tipsy and pissed.

He tries to reason with her. Hey, maybe Daniel wasn’t this great guy you thought he was. Maybe it’s time to finally move on and be happy again. In turn, she feels smothered and attacked. He fails to convince her that Daniel wouldn’t react the same way if the roles were reversed. When he blocks her attempt to drive drunk, she snaps and eventually walks home defeated as always.

On the verge of suicide, another familiar ringtone saves Becky’s life in ways that she will never expect. Hunter’s back home (Becky’s dad’s been calling her, too) and thinks she has a foolproof plan to rescue her lonely pal.

There’s a discontinued TV tower not found on any map that’s about twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Thin, long and rickety, no reasonable person would ever think of scaling this aging monstrosity. Hunter is not reasonable.

She wants Becky to face her fears in a most visceral manner, a sort of radical, extreme form of cognitive therapy, you could say. The brunette won’t accept her father’s wisdom but she will ultimately go along with this doomed expedition. She continually puts her faith in the wrong people.

Once they get there it becomes very clear that Hunter never did her homework. She didn’t mention all those determined vultures nor the fact that the tower looks like it’s barely holding together. She also didn’t seem to know that you’re not actually allowed to be anywhere near this thing.

“NO TRESPASSING – DANGER OF DEATH” reads the sign in front of a locked gate. You cannot say they weren’t warned. With the sun blazing, Hunter as always takes the lead. Becky needs constant encouragement to keep going. Should’ve brought more than one bottle of water, ladies.

Hunter has her own YouTube channel. She calls herself Danger D (sounds more like a Bud Bundy rap persona) and films all her global exploits, greatly emphasizing her sexuality. (“Tits for clicks,” she explains unapologetically while wearing a very revealing push-up bra. Two guys wrote this.) Hardly seems worth it though when the Lara Croft wannabe only has 60000 followers. More like cleavage for clicks.

Instead of connecting a GoPro to her chest while they climb, Hunter will only film short clips with her phone at the start and finish, and when they finally reach the top, she will also insist on having snaps taken while foolishly dangling over the edge of a tiny platform hanging on only using one hand. Then she will push the reticent Becky to do the same, even though during the climb she clearly saw a big loosened screw plummeting right past her.

Basking in their lucky triumph, it’s time to come down and go home. But of course, that giant ladder will break and collapse, and despite running through a number of ideas to get off this fucking thing, they will be left here baking, thirsting and starving for days. How they avoid sunburn is a mystery.

During the accident, their bag of supplies and their video drone fall off the platform but conveniently land in a spot where they, after a while, will eventually be retrieved, although the circumstances of that retrieval won’t be fully clear until a pivotal moment when we realize the importance of regular sleep. (That said, it’s enough with the “it was only a nightmare” False Alarms which you always see coming., only one of which is a bad omen.)

All the while, there are hope spots. A couple of shady guys in the area who maybe can see them high above if they can make enough noise or attract enough attention. A message written in eyeliner and attached to that drone if only it can reach their hotel when it’s at its busiest. Their cell phones with pre-typed emergency texts each secured and padded in Hunter’s running shoes waiting to be sent but needing to be dropped to the ground because there’s no signal at 2000 feet. (You can only look at pictures and videos from up here.)

You can pretty much guess how a lot of this will go. The two men who they think will save them turn out to be more interested in their abandoned car. The first cell phone drop does not result in an immediate rescue. And I laughed very hard when disaster strikes their drone.

Actually, it takes two attempts to fly the damn thing. First, it doesn’t have enough juice and needs to be recharged. After they MacGiver a solution, introduced during the diner scene, Becky is the one who has to climb even higher to implement it. Cue the hovering vulture.

And then there’s the internal drama between the two friends. Long before it’s revealed, you know exactly why Hunter’s been avoiding Becky. It makes you wonder if guilt is her real motivation rather than altruism. And if she’s really regretful, why did she get that tattoo? I mean it’s like she wanted to get caught.

Having to put her sudden resentment aside so they can both survive this very dumb dilemma they haphazardly threw themselves into, Becky will soon realize she now has a reason to let go. Thinking catastrophically, she belatedly admits she blew it with her dad and films what she thinks will be her last video to him. If you watched Frozen, you know she’ll be fine. That meddlesome vulture, on the other hand.

Let’s be clear about one thing. The set design and cinematography are the absolute best things about Fall. They picked beautiful locations to film. No stunt doubles here, even though the actors were never in any real danger. The best scene is the climb. It’s harrowing. The movie does an excellent job of making you believe that’s a big-ass tower and it’s never a good idea to look down. You can feel it in your legs. I can only imagine how this all looked on IMAX a couple of years ago during its profitable theatrical run.

The problem is the circumstance that leads to this expedition. Hunter’s solution to help Becky overcome her depression is to put her in another dangerous situation similar to the one that caused that depression in the first place. And the result is exactly the same!

And what about their lack of preparation for potential calamities, inexcusable considering the opening scene. Hunter wholeheartedly believes this will be a quick little release for her friend and then everything will be back to normal. They only bring water! On a hot sunny day! There are no contingency plans whatsoever. When they find themselves fucked, over time they improvise with the limited capabilities of their handheld technology and not very well, either. You’d think past experience would inspire more caution.

Look, I get it. Becky’s stuck in a horrendous rut. Her life is frozen by tragedy. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. She needs something powerful to pull her out of the darkness and back into the light. But surely, there are healthier ways to get past your grief.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, February 16, 2024
3:07 a.m.

Watcher (2022)

He lives on the fifth floor in the old building across the street. When night falls, there he is, staring at her, just a shadow without a face. This is what happens when you’re hot and take forever to put up curtains.

Such is the dilemma lovely Maika Monroe faces in Watcher. With her cute Kurt Cobain haircut and striking angelic features, she is a Hitchcockian heroine completely out of her element.

The decision she makes to uproot her American life for a duller one in Romania of all places is beyond misguided. It’s all because of her selfish, clueless partner. And he’s far from hunky.

He happens to speak the language fluently (she’s just starting to learn it) and he’s agreed to move here because of the opportunity for advancement. He’s a workaholic marketer barely home in their new apartment.

Left alone for much of the time, she wanders the streets and sites of beautiful Bucharest during the day and lollygags around at home during the night. She gave up acting for this?

The only excitement is uncertain danger in the form of The Spider, a mysterious serial killer with a predilection for decapitation. There have been several victims thus far, all young women, but just one survivor. Who’s next?

Her rather boring existence gets a lot more interesting when she decides to take in a joined-in-progress screening of Charade (subtle, guys) and there he is, moving up in the row right behind her, groaning a little like Michael Myers. But you can’t top the master.

And when she almost decides to give in to her once abandoned nicotine addiction (she eventually falls off the wagon), there he is again seemingly following her around in the grocery store. That’s not a good place to put jarred pickles, fellas.

Already wanting to go home, besides reverting back to those nasty ciggys, Monroe starts making questionable decisions, like waving at the guy one night just to make sure, yes, he is in fact stalking me. (Were you really that doubtful, toots?) Or later when she spots him wandering around town and starts foolishly stalking her stalker as she watches him feeding the pigeons and taking in a meal outdoors, even going so far as to follow him into his rundown building. (Why do you think he’s covering his face with that newspaper? He can see you, bitch!)

That last ploy backfires. He calls the cops on her and suddenly, there he is at her door, quietly pretending to be embarrassed, deliberately avoiding eye contact as they are forced by the same officer she contacted a little earlier to avoid such a scene to shake hands because you know, this was all a big “misunderstanding”. It will not be their last meeting.

“Fucking cops are useless,” a wise man says later on. But come on, this is just dumb.

Even dumber is the reaction of her man, who despite going back to the grocery store to look at surveillance footage (they can only get a sideview of his face which she quickly captures on her phone) and even going with that same cop to the weird guy’s door just to confront him, does not believe she’s in any danger. He even gets caught making a bad joke about it, in Romanian, right in front of her to colleagues at a cocktail party. Why exactly is she with this asshole?

It is not until the inevitable climax that he finally realizes, oh shit, maybe I should’ve believed her. As she looks straight at him in the last shot, I was hoping she would say, “I’m going home. Don’t call me.”

Watcher is a frustrating experience. It starts very slowly with a couple whose chemistry is non-existent and who aren’t particularly enthralling. Basically, not much happens despite the pretty scenery.

Then things start to pick up considerably during an at-home dinner when a discussion about The Spider reveals some disturbing details. Over time I started feeling that welcome sense of dread in my stomach, the same feeling I had throughout much of The Shining.

But at the same time I didn’t really care about many of the characters in Watcher and so we have all this unsettling atmosphere skillfully orchestrated through camera and score but no real investment in the outcome of the plot which you can easily predict anyway.

Monroe’s got charisma with a capital C but her character’s a total contradiction, an odd, incompatible mix of fear and chutzpah.

One minute she’s having a premonition about what could happen to her (a nightmare that becomes all too real), the next she’s a courageous amateur detective on an impromptu reconnaissance mission but without a disguise or a weapon.

Unable to sleep because of her anxiety (first, because of the move and then because of him), after getting someone else to confront her future attacker by pounding on and yelling at his front door without success, she herself knocks as well only to encounter the man’s elderly and harmless father instead. No woman would do this in the real world. They’d be hopping on the next available plane.

The villain is too much like Norman Bates, an antisocial, short-haired nebbish who reeks of obvious awkwardness, a screaming red flag that doesn’t seem to attract any attention beyond his doomed victims. Like Monroe herself, we know what’s in that bag. How come no one notices a smell?

He draws too much attention to himself and yet even the police are looking elsewhere. He looks the part but how does he stand out amongst a long cinematic legacy of woman-hating serial killers? How can he stand out when he’s not original? Plus, he seems more like a rapist than a murderer to me.

And he’s also hit-and-miss when it comes to his technique. Monroe makes friends with her neighbour, a former ballet dancer who she unexpectedly discovers is now a stripper in a strange underground club that is apparently located in the same building as The Spider. (By the way, how do they get tipped if they’re strutting around in glass cases? Is there a slot where you can shove in Euros?)

At some point, she goes missing and Monroe gets understandably worried. When we find out her fate, we’re wondering why the killer botches his aim with his next victim. Regardless, how is she able to survive for all that time having lost all that goddamn blood? Shouldn’t she have passed out already?

Writer/director Chloe Okuno was onto something here. She has a great visual sense, her cinematographer making highly effective use of existing European architecture but her story lacks imagination. She and her craftspeople can set a mood as well as Kubrick and his team but can’t pay it off like they could.

Watcher lacks dark humour, too, unlike the underrated Ginger Snaps. Its uneven pacing reminding you over and over again that it’s an indie film with a start-and-stop fetish. But Halloween is just as entertaining when it’s not terrifying you. It does not suffer from any inconsistency and we cared about everybody. What’s this movie’s excuse?

I’ll tell you. It’s an overdependence on False Alarms in between those slow-ass conversations and underwhelming horror scenes. I must’ve counted half a dozen over the course of the film. When it actually tries to be scary, like I said, it doesn’t know how to apply the exclamation point.

Despite being made by a woman, stripped down to its very essence Watcher is very much another recycled woman-in-danger thriller. Yes, much is made of Monroe’s alienation especially in the company of Romanians who don’t speak her language. But it’s The Spider who dominates, the only reason to pay attention. If only he lived up to the billing and the killing.

There’s a famous adage in fiction. If you introduce a gun at some point in your story, it ultimately has to go off. Bottom line, someone needs to pull the trigger. The second Monroe’s friend shows her her own pistol, Watcher has already spoiled its ending. It would’ve been more impactful if she aimed it at her boyfriend.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, February 3, 2024
2:33 a.m.