This was an amazing exercise in insanity. A young woman has a melodramatic conversation with her sister right before visiting her parents, then suddenly has a vision of pure horror. She wakes up in bed, suddenly has a husband, can't remember anything, gets weird visits from a bearded guy who might or might not exist.
I burst out laughing at least once every five minutes. Everyone is trying so hard to be serious, and the story is trying so hard to be terrifying, that I could feel the movie collapsing under the weight of its own incoherence. When is this supposed to be taking place? I noticed the rotary phones and the typewriter. Yet there is no sense of setting in the story, the old-fashioned props are just there to make things look gothic. Same with the grandfather clock.
So many times, Sarah would see something or experience something and then wake up, as if it were all a dream - to the point where I had no idea if anything was really happening or not, so I found it impossible to take anything seriously. What difference does it make what happens in this scene? She's just going to wake up again. And then we get so many bizarre shots of Sarah seeing Sarah. A different Sarah? An evil Sarah? A Sarah from the past?
Sarah and her husband have many conversations in this movie. But they do not sound like human conversations. Nick says that he wants to protect Sarah, and Sarah insists that someone is invading the house. Rinse and repeat. There is also the framing device of pig meat - early in the movie we see bacon, and toward the end we get a whole roast pig. Interpret that however you like.
Oh, and the photography. My god. Constant blur effects, and switching back and forth between different visions, to create the sense of confusion. I could feel the director grabbing camera and shouting into it, "THIS IS SCARY! I'M DOING SOME WEIRD THINGS HERE!"
"The Free Fall" is incompetent, preposterous, and insane. If it had been a little more fantastical and done a bit more with practical effects, it could have been another "Troll 2." I know this is a terrible movie, but I was mesmerized. You don't get unintentional hilarity like this just every day.
