'Fall 2: Deadpoint' Proves You Can Climb Higher and Still Go Nowhere
The Spierig Brothers went bigger for the follow-up to their surprise 2022 hit — a taller mountain, a nastier fall, a body count with a drug-smuggling twist. What "Fall 2: Deadpoint" didn't bring back is the thing that made the original work: the terror of watching two people trapped somewhere they have no business being, with nothing but a plan gone wrong between them and the ground.
A Bigger Peg, A Smaller Story
Released September 2 by Lionsgate and Grindstone Entertainment Group, "Fall 2: Deadpoint" follows Jax Hunter (Harriet Slater), still grieving her sister Shiloh, as she's pulled into a plank walk on Mount Kwan in Thailand by a woman claiming to be Shiloh's old friend, Luce (Arsema Thomas). Directors Peter and Michael Spierig, working from a script by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank, strand their leads on a narrow plank three thousand feet up after a rockslide takes out their only way down — and that's before the film reveals its hand.
The twist: "Luce" isn't who she says she is. She's Billie, a fan impersonating Shiloh's real friend to get close to Jax. Their guide Jon (Tom Brittney) turns out to be smuggling fentanyl and tries to use the accident to bury the evidence — and the bodies. It's a lot of plot for a movie whose entire appeal is supposed to be the queasy simplicity of "what if you were very high up and could not get down."
Where It Works, and Where It Slips
Critics have landed roughly in the middle. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 55% from 51 reviews, Metacritic at 54, and audiences gave it a B− CinemaScore — numbers that track with a sequel everyone agrees is competent but not essential. The vertigo set pieces still land; the Spierigs know how to make a plank a few inches wide feel like the entire world. Slater and Thomas sell the physical panic even when the dialogue around it isn't doing them any favors.
The trouble is the movie doesn't trust its own premise. The original "Fall" worked because it kept the stakes brutally simple. "Deadpoint" keeps bolting on more — a secret identity, a smuggling operation, a late-film betrayal — until the mountain itself starts to feel like the least dangerous thing in the story. Several reviews single out the back half's twists as the point where tension gives way to eye-rolling, even as the film wisely keeps its runtime under 100 minutes so it never fully collapses under its own additions.
Worth the Climb?
At $19.8 million worldwide against a modest budget, "Fall 2: Deadpoint" isn't a disaster — it's a B-movie sequel doing B-movie sequel business, escalating because that's what sequels are contractually obligated to do. If you came for the original's stomach-drop simplicity, you'll get flashes of it between the plot mechanics. If you came hoping the Spierigs found a way to out-terrify a plank a few inches wide with an even higher plank a few inches wide, the commitment to the bit is at least admirable, even when the script isn't.
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