Directed By Michael and Peter Spierig

Starring – Harriet Slater, Arsema Thomas, Tom Brittney

The Plot – Overwhelmed by her sister Shiloh’s death, Jax (Slater) connects with Luce (Thomas), Hunter’s fearless friend. To heal, they attempt the infamous plank walk of Mount Kwan in Thailand. After a sudden rockslide leaves them stranded on a fragile plank 3000 feet in the air, Jax must confront her deepest fears and fight for survival to find closure.

Rated PG-13 for strong adult language, some violent content/bloody images and drug material.

Fall 2: Deadpoint (2026) Official Trailer 2 – Harriet Slater, Arsema Thomas

POSITIVES

All preconceived expectations aside about the lack of creative flexibility to such a minimized concept, Fall 2: Deadpoint legitimately justifies the air of its cinematic existence with a thematically connected screenplay that not only expands upon the lore of its original installment, but also finds a compellingly vulnerable angle to enact another gut-wrenching set piece sure to induce anxiety to its immersed audiences. Part of the aforementioned connectivity certainly spawns from the original movie’s writer and director, Scott Mann, returning once again to pen a script that certainly appraises connectivity to the friendship dynamics of the original film, with our protagonist here driven jealously by an agonizing disconnect to her deceased sister, but just as much importance is entertainingly elongated by its decision to slow down and take its time more intentionally to building the motivations and objectives of its characters to the opening act, helping to allow the experience more mobility in the sifted-out explorations of its characters’ grief, fear and closure before the overwhelming dread of their isolated helplessness takes grip of the movie’s consistent focus. While Mann’s finished draft is far from perfect, specifically with a third act that flies off of the deep end in the most unpredictable of ways, there is a believable butterfly effect surmised to the definition of the world-building that helps this film feel like the next logical step in the series’ evolution, eliciting many of the very same admirable qualities about that original film, but now with an underlined understanding of the stakes and circumstances that previously cost Jax the relationship that she valued most. Aside from Mann’s valuable influence in making this sequel feel directly plucked from the original world of the first movie, it’s also elevated by meaningful performances from Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas seamlessly bringing to life the fear and desperation of their bleakly ominous outlook, which helps to override so many of the familiarities within their personality designs when compared to those of Becky and Shiloh in the first movie. Slater especially conveys psychological traumas of the past in ways that feel painfully tangible in the current, where the air of her disconnected and distracting frame of mind keeps her from fully comprehending the magnitude of her life-altering decisions, unloading a turn that feels ripe with emotional frailty, even without the dramatic diatribes that we’ve come to expect in these kinds of movies. Thomas’ supporting turn isn’t as dependably utilized as Slater’s, though her dependable physicality and determinative drive capably steers the storytelling into some unforeseen avenues of exploration that eventually come to redefine her character during the second half of the movie, and with the details of her backstory remaining mostly obscured until the movie sheds light on them, there’s an autopiloted ambiguity to her approach that continuously drives the palpable distancing between these characters, without any semblance of the natural chemistry that ignited Becky and Shiloh’s dynamic. Lastly, the filmmaking itself should do enough to conjure the very same tension and danger of the original movie, specifically this time in the air of Andrew Strahorn’s captivating cinematography, which takes full advantage of the perilous magnitude of such a desolately desperate situation. While many of Strahorn’s techniques mostly stick to the proven playbook established artistically by the first film, it doesn’t make the nerve-shattering POV perspective shots over an edge, or the inserts of loosening screws or crumbling rocks, feel any less effective towards heightening audience suspense, where even much of the initial scaling of breathtaking scenic splendor is utilized conceptually to tease everything that could go wrong along the way, making it all the easier to immerse ourselves uncomfortably in the plight of the characters, where every step crucially emphasizes the environmental elements that remain out of the control of our characters.

NEGATIVES

As to where most sequels either phone it in with an unambitious screenplay that is a beat-for-beat navigating of its original film, or an exaggeratedly surreal exploration with enough ambitious swings to stand out, for better or worse, Deadpoint feels like a creative tug-of-war that is contentiously caught in the crossfires of a divided studio with their own desire for what the complexion of the franchise should look like, leading it down a dark and windingly unfulfilling road that somehow feels like a film that I previously experienced, while also one that is anxiously eager to differentiate from it in the most sacrificially depleting kind of ways. For much of the first half, it feels like the reheated leftovers of the first film, right down to formulaically interchangeable outlines of character actions and exposition-heavy conversations that ultimately echo everything previously experienced, but as the film drifts aimlessly into a strangely surreal second half, which takes it from a gripping singular set piece into just another man-made action conflict, it starts to feel glaringly evident the lack of patience and confidence that Mann has in the entertainment value of his dizzying set piece, even with the pleasantries of an airtight 92-minute runtime (Ten minutes less than the original) keeping much of the meandering of the first film, or the characterization of this film far from this movie’s attainable grasp. Considering Mann had four years to perfect the mistakes of his predecessor, the outlining here feels especially erratic and even sloppy at times, such as the predictably telegraphed way of inserting background exposition to the established setting, which is so forcefully included to resonate somewhere eventually in the extent of the narrative journey of these characters. Why otherwise would a movie about pertaining to two women trapped on a crumbling mountain visually and audibly include a TV news briefing about a Fentanyl outbreak among its Thai citizens? But even when it’s not paving a roughly rigid road to future conflicts, the script juggles flashback sequencing to hint towards uncovering some monumental big reveal between the sisters, and without anything even remotely justifying the consistency its constant incorporation, it left me yearning to return to the simplistic fun factors of the intended set piece, even with so much of The Spierg’s streaky direction failing to draw out the dramatic tension of a seismically shifting mountain at their disposal. As for the Spierg’s direction, part of the problem is certainly that so much of the movie’s enticing imagery is spoiled by artificiality in sets that eviscerate any semblance of immersion to the intended environment, especially with an already firm dependency upon C.G articulated backdrops, but The Spierg’s direction feels crucially constricted by the air of the movie’s aforementioned runtime pushing them to maintain the urgency of the narrative, and while it keeps the details of the events constantly unraveling, the periodic conflicts are resolved so abruptly that they fail to flirt with uncertainty in the interpretation of the audience, making the physically grueling conflict feel less as challenging than its predecessor, despite being twice as tall and environmentally unpredictable. Speaking of artificiality, the sound designs and sloppily intrusive A.D.R deposits are just as condemning to the integrity of the established environment, where despite characters embattled in a storm atop thousands of feet on a mountainside, can somehow still talk like they’re in a silent classroom. Truthfully, the storm itself is one scene throughout the entirety of the movie, but the abundance of back-acting (As I call it) utilizes post-production edit as a way of overcoming missed or unfulfilling line reads from the clarity of the actors, and considering just as many conversations are enacted audibly with inconsistent sound levels, as they are visually, it casts an unavoidably obnoxious distraction over the integrity and authenticity factors of the conversations, leaving it difficult to remain faithfully invested to vital exposition, even in a movie that I could watch on mute and still feel like I Understand everything creatively intentioned. Finally, while hardcore enthusiasts of the first film will be thrilled to know that this once singular experience has now ballooned into a proposed trilogy, as a result of the directional objective of this film’s ending combining the worlds and characters of the first two films, the unfortunate reality is that it leaves us on the kind of uncompelling cliffhanger that makes it feel like an entirely different film all together, and not one that is not necessarily preoccupied with the realistically mature side of character grieving. It makes so many of the character journeys in this film feel insignificant by where they’re inevitably taking them, but beyond that tacks on an additional conflict that doesn’t feel slightly earned or necessary from the character from which it spawned from, leaving the resolution in this film feeling all the more unfulfilling by bigger and broader adventures that linger the kind of logical questions that don’t necessarily subscribe to curiosity.

OVERALL
Fall 2: Deadpoint attempts to replicate the vertiginous tensions of its 2022 original movie without feeling like a carbon copy, but ultimately descends its creative ambitions with a streaky and siphoned experience too artificially tangible to ever feel gripping. While the script undeniably takes big strides towards a strangely silly future, the plunging drop in productional quality obscures the anxieties of its immersive experience, resulting in another inferior sequel that proves the bigger they are, the harder they fall

My Grade: 4.6 or D