Fall 2: Deadpoint (2026)

A single plank, bolted into rock six thousand feet above a Thai gorge, does more work in Fall 2: Deadpoint than most of its dialogue manages across ninety-eight minutes. Thin. Swaying. Absurdly inadequate for what it’s being asked to hold. That image is the whole pitch of this franchise, distilled to one prop, and it’s the reason I went in wanting to like the film more than I expected to by the end.

Jax (Harriet Slater) is still grieving her sister Shiloh, who died attempting a stunt climb in the first film. When Shiloh’s old friend Luce (Arsema Thomas) turns up with a scrapbook of the climbs Shiloh never finished, Jax agrees to complete one: a plank walk across Mount Kwan in Thailand, toward a dragon statue locals say can “eat your fears.” She shouldn’t have agreed. The mountain, of course, has other plans, and neither woman is walking off it the way she walked on.

Peter and Michael Spierig, the Australian twins who built the original around a single decommissioned television tower, know how to shoot altitude. A wide shot early on holds just long enough for the stomach to catch up. The centrepiece rockslide, which I won’t describe beyond saying it happens, is the best fifteen minutes of pure staging either film has produced. Where the first Fall trusted one clean vertical drop to do all its work, this sequel keeps adding complications: new terrain, a second threat, a widened cast of people who might or might not make it down. Some of that pays off. A lot of it just crowds the frame.

Slater carries the emotional load competently, and Thomas gives Luce a wiry, slightly untrustworthy energy that keeps the film’s back half more interesting than its dialogue deserves. The screenplay, credited to Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank, has a bad habit of explaining feelings that the actors have already shown us, and a late plot mechanism strains credibility past the point the film has earned. I’d call that its central problem. It doesn’t trust its own premise, so it keeps bolting new premises on top of it, the way you’d keep hammering pitons into rock that’s already crumbling.

None of which erases what works. The sound design alone, every creak of rope and shift of scree pitched to sit right under the skin, does more to sustain the vertigo than the script ever does. And there’s a real, if unglamorous, honesty in how the film treats grief as something people carry up a mountain rather than resolve at the summit.

Fall 2: Deadpoint is a decent survival thriller that never quite decides whether it wants to be a tighter version of the original or a bigger one. It ends up as neither. Fans of the first film will get a competent, occasionally gripping sequel. Anyone hoping for the clean, singular terror of that first tower should keep their expectations somewhere closer to ground level.