Sequelizing 2022’s surprise horror-thriller hit Fall could be a simple assignment: Find a bunch of other victims and dangle them from the top of another tower. But like the foolhardy heroes at the center of this week’s Fall 2: Deadpoint, directors Michael and Peter Spierig weren’t looking for a walk in the park.
“We didn’t wanna make it a tower or anything similar to the first film,” Peter Spierig tells Polygon. “There was just no point of going there again.”
For the brothers, Fall writer-director Scott Mann set the bar — ahem — high. So, instead of chasing that glory again, they looked at real-world environments that could offer both a visceral thrill more room for character movement and varying set pieces. The solution: recreate China’s Huashan Plank Walk, which by all accounts is… a legit IRL nightmare.
Thousands of people attempt versions of the real-world attraction each year, and videos of it gave the filmmakers a useful preview of exactly what audiences would find terrifying. Their characters could go up and down and left and right.
“We could go sideways and have all kinds of bad things happen,” Peter says.
In Fall 2, Jax (Harriet Slater) and Luce (Arsema Thomas) aren’t simply stuck in one place waiting for rescue. Their route across the mountain gives the Spierigs new terrain to weaponize, from rotten planks to slippery surfaces and the appropriate amount of falling rock. The physical obstacles are all in the name of telling a surprisingly emotional story, as Slater’s Jax deals with the death of her sister, Shiloh, from the first movie. Deadpoint definitely stands on its own, but it also tees up a larger story set for Fall 3. Michael says he and Peter have consulted on the third film, though it remains writer-director Scott Mann’s project. “It’s Scott’s trilogy,” he says. “They’ve done such a good job.”
For the Spierigs, the real thrill of Fall 2 was getting out in the open air and shooting as much of the movie on location as possible. Rather than retreating into a soundstage, the brothers and their crew built a faux cliffside environment in a quarry and put their performers on physical planks, in actual sunlight, with real wind and rain machines battering them.
The set was only about 40 feet above the ground. The movie, of course, needed it to feel like thousands.
Peter admits the decision confused plenty of people on the production. “We had a lot of crew members ask, ‘Why did you do this!?’” he says. “Why make it so much harder?”
Difficulty, it turns out, keeps you on your toes. If an actor has to climb onto a narrow plank while wearing a harness, baking under the sun and getting hit with artificial rain and wind, that discomfort becomes part of the performance. The audience may never know exactly what was real and what was enhanced with visual effects, but they’ll feel the difference.
Michael puts the philosophy bluntly: “When you go to the movies, you want an experience. You don’t want to feel like you’ve been ripped off.”
The Spierigs even incorporated the language of modern amateur climbing videos, building a camera rig onto the actors to recreate the intimate, point-of-view perspective audiences have become accustomed to seeing on GoPros and social media. If your movie is called Fall 2, falling better look pretty real and pretty awful.
“This is not a superhero movie,” Michael says. “It’s more about what can an actual human achieve.”
Still, don’t try this at home.
Fall 2: Deadpoint is out in theaters now.
