Knee-jerk review: "Fall"

1. Scary.
2. It's got a B-movie vibe, indie budget, no name cast.  We wanted to roll our eyes and find fault somewhere, but honestly it's lean and mean and tightly constructed.  This is played deadly straight.
3. Lionsgate was absolutely right to put this in theaters and buck the increasingly irritating "let's just stream it" default position.  We worry that aside from Marvel blockbusters, movie theaters soon won't have anything to show.  Film distributors need to, like, distribute.
4. Textbook high concept premise - two thrill-seekers climb an old isolated radio tower in the middle of nowhere, then get stranded - gets elevated by some unexpected emotional layers and character reveals. 
5. We're afraid of heights and so at times this was a very hard thing to sit through.  It's been a long, long time since we literally wanted to look away.  (Fun fact: the last time we had this much trouble hanging in there during a scary movie was M. Night Shyamalan's deeply unsettling The Visit.)
6. We must all celebrate when movie characters find reasonable, logical solutions to seemingly impossible problems.  No one cheats here, although the range of a remote controlled drone maybe stretches plausibility.
7. To us, Jeffrey Dean Morgan has an undeniable cool factor.  He's always magnetic.
8. If you're curious, there's very little greenscreen work.  The filmmakers built the top of the tower on a mountain so they could fake the height.  It looks like they're up in the air even though they're really only a few off the top of the mountain.
9. Palms were sweaty for the entire runtime, if you must know.
10. We can surely all agree that people who climb mountains for fun are certifiable.

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