In the 2022 film Fall, two friends, Becky and Hunter (Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner), scale a 2,000-foot-high communications tower in order to scatter the ashes of Becky’s dead husband Dan, a climber who fell to his death a year earlier. The women become trapped at the top of one of the tallest towers in the world when the ladder beneath them breaks. Worst still, they’re in the middle of nowhere and their phones and other forms of communication won’t work when they attempt to call for help.
The movie is reminiscent of films like 127 Hours and Thirteen Lives which both center on characters who are trapped in perilous life or death situations as they await rescue. And while those two films are based on well-known, true life scenarios, you might think that Fall is also based on a true story, too.
With its palm-sweat-inducing tension and thrilling scenes that will make anyone afraid of heights, you would think that Fall was based on a true story, but the film is in fact completely made up. The film’s director, Scott Mann, explained that the idea for the film came from a movie he worked on previously, 2018’s Final Score. “The inception of the height idea came about when we were shooting Final Score at a stadium in the UK. We were filming at height, and off camera we got into this interesting conversation about height and the fear of falling and how that’s inside of all of us, really, and how that can be a great device for a movie,” Mann told Radio Times in 2022.
“I think the key to it was finding these actual towers that exist in America,” Mann continued. “[They] exist in the desert there, it was just like that is the perfect location, the perfect kind of character to be at the centre of this nutty thing.” (While many of the film’s establishing shots were filmed at the B67 tower, which is the tallest structure in California, at 2,049 feet, most of the scenes were filmed on structures far shorter, roughly 100 feet high.)
So while Fall is not based on a true story, it’s safe to say that the terror of watching two people survive for days while sitting in a tiny platform more than 2,000 feet in the air is very real.