Summary

• Director Scott Mann and the main actors Grace Caroline Currey (Becky) and Virginia Gardner (Hunter) capture the intense, complicated friendship between Becky and Hunter in as they are stranded on a tower.
• Fall's twist ending brings in psychological horror elements as Hunter's fate is revealed.
• While there are already two sequels in production for Fall, other movies like The Descent, Escape Room, and 47 Meters Down could also be entertaining for fans of Fall.

Released in 2022, the movie Fall was a surprise hit thriller that reached disturbing heights. Focusing on two women who scale a 2,000-foot-tall tower, the movie plunges to the depths of their souls as they also face a colossal threat. In the end, the movie came to a conclusion that shocked many viewers and pushed it beyond its rote elements.

Despite its somewhat low-key release, Fall ended up becoming a giant success. Making about seven times its production budget, the movie also found a towering viewership on Netflix. With multiple sequels already announced, more viewers than ever are wondering about the Fall movie and its plot twist ending.

Updated by Jordan Iacobucci on May 14, 2024: The surprise hit thriller Fall is getting two sequels, which will film concurrently beginning in June. With the developing franchise underway, dive back into the high-stakes ending of the original film with all-new analysis and commentary from our contributors here at CBR.

The Premise of Scott Man's Fall

Fall Follows Two Friends Who Get Stranded On A High Platform

In the movie Fall, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) make a perilous ascent up a 2,000-foot radio tower in the middle of nowhere to escape personal demons. Becky lost her husband Dan a year before while rock climbing, so Hunter wanted them to scale to the top, scatter Dan's ashes, and liberate those emotions. She would get back her daredevil best friend by helping Becky get over the tragedy that was pushing her into depression.

However, shady secrets emerge, as well as sinister conditions that lead to a death-defying ending and an epic plot twist. This ending involves betrayal and a particularly gruesome set of events. It's clear that the title for the movie Fall isn't merely something to do with physical height, but also the fall of the human spirit and hope. In fact, the true fall is the fallout between the tattered friendship of the movie's two main characters.

What Happened Between Becky and Hunter?

Becky and Hunter Are Divided Over A Miserable Affair

In the movie Fall, the two aforementioned friends got marooned atop the tower when the rotting ladder collapsed, and their bag fell onto a satellite platform. All they had was 50 feet of rope, with the bag containing a drone with a dead battery and water. This left them hopeless after spending three nights there, with no one knowing where they were. To make it worse, there wasn't any cell service, breaking them mentally.

However, when they tried to drop a phone tucked into one of Hunter's shoes as padding, Becky saw a "143" tattoo on Hunter's foot. This was Dan's way of saying he loved Becky, and in reconciling some footage she viewed from her wedding, she realized Hunter had had an affair with Dan -- marking a massive betrayal from her supposed friend. This explained why Hunter pushed for the trip, eager to work through her own pain on the fatal anniversary.

Does Hunter Die In Fall?

Hunter's Fate Makes For The Big Twist Ending In Fall

Near the beginning of the ending for the movie Fall, the friends put the drama aside, with Becky lowering Hunter to grab the bag with the drone. However, Hunter had to jump onto a small satellite platform to get the bag. She then used a selfie stick to attach the bag to the rope and leaped off to hook herself to the rope. But on the way up, Hunter fell back onto the platform. Luckily, Becky didn't have to experience seeing her die, as she did Dan in the movie Fall's opening act. Becky eventually pulled up the bag, as well as Hunter.

With Hunter now injured, Becky then scaled to the top, where the beacon light was, rigged a charge using her wedding band, and got back down. However, after sending the drone up, it got hit by a truck en route to a nearby motel with an SOS note. This shattered Becky even more, leading to a terrifying twist. Becky was curious why Hunter didn't catch the bag when it fell, and also, the audience wonders why Hunter didn't warn Becky about the truck. It turns out Becky was hallucinating Hunter all along. Hunter's death had already occurred, in the fall onto the platform. She bled out, in a remix of the ghost trope found in films like The Sixth Sense.

How Did Becky Escape In Fall?

Becky Manages To Survive Fall's Death-Defying Ending

Becky, dehydrated and tired, struggled to stay awake, but she finally stopped feeling sorry for herself. She'd been attacked by Fall's true villain--a particularly nasty vulture--up top but when it returned to poke at her damaged leg, she killed and ate it in a vicious, bloody manner, which added to the horror vibe of Fall's finale. This erased the fear and respect she had for the scavenger after seeing it devour Carrion below at the site. This garnered her strength, tying into how the "Ghost Hunter" bullied her, ridiculing Becky for being an alpha. Becky then scaled down to the satellite platform, stuck her phone with an SOS inside Hunter's wound, apologized, and kicked her body off.

Seeing as they got data at the bottom, Becky hoped her message for help would go through. She left a video, crying for her dad, James (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, The Walking Dead), as he had tried to warn her about Dan in the past. She finally appreciated him, and thankfully, James got the note and raced to the desert. When he arrived, he saw the authorities bagging up a corpse, but it wasn't Becky -- it was Hunter. Becky ran out to meet him in a tearful reunion, with a chopper overhead at night, confirming they brought Becky down after James sent word.

The Main Cast and Director of the Movie Fall

Scott Mann

The director of the movie Fall was Scott Mann, whose first feature film was the 2009 action movie The Tournament. Though the movie wasn't financially successful in its theatrical run, its low budget of $8 million USD prepared the filmmaker for a career of movies with a somewhat similar scope. 2015 saw the release of Mann's Heist, which starred iconic actor Robert De Niro, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kate Bosworth, and Dave Bautista.

Final Score came out in 2018 and was Mann's next movie, which also starred Bautista. It came out in the same year as the History Channel TV series Six, with Scott Mann directing one of its episodes. He also directed 3 episodes of the series The Oath, which came out the following year. Fall is his most recent feature film, as well as the only one to make a profit in its theatrical run. It's currently unknown if Mann will return to helm the sequel to the Fall film.

Grace Caroline Currey

Grace Caroline Currey is an actress and dancer who began her career as a child on the TV series That's Life. Many of her appearances on TV shows were more minor, single-episode roles, quite a few of which were as younger versions of recurring characters on those shows. This included the role of the young Melinda Gordon on the TV series Ghost Whisperer, which ran on CBS for five years. Her first major movie role was as Celina Rice in 2007's Badland. Conversely, she also had a small role in Annabelle: Creation, which is set in the shared Conjuring Universe.

Easily her most iconic movie role so far, however, was as the DC Comics character Mary Bromfield in the DC Extended Universe Shazam! movies. Currey (under her maiden name Grace Fulton) portrayed Mary's mortal form in the first Shazam!, with the now older character playing both Mary and her superheroic form in the 2023 sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods. The release of that movie and the preceding Fall both brought a lot more attention to the actress.

Virginia Gardner

Virginia Gardner's acting career began in 2011 when she played Young Lemon on an episode of Hart of Dixie. Other prominent roles from this era include appearances on the Disney Channel series Lab Rats and the Fox musical-drama Glee. Like her co-star from the movie Fall Grace Caroline Currey, she also has a history with a shared superhero universe. She portrayed Karolina Dean on the TV series Marvel's Runaways, which was set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Her role in Runaways earned her a Golden Issue Award for Best Ensemble Cast (shared with the Cast). Since then, she's also been in shows such as The Righteous Gemstones and the spooky anthology American Horror Stories. Gardner's first major movie role was in 2015's Project Almanac, where she played Christina, the sister of protagonist David Raskin. Since then, she's become something of a horror movie scream queen, with one of her roles in the genre being in the 2018 Halloween reboot. After the release of the movie Fall, her biggest role was in Beautiful Disaster, which is based on the novel of the same name by Jamie McGuire. She's currently set to reprise her role as Abby Abernathy in the sequel Beautiful Wedding.

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