The Free Fall

Grimmfest 2021

Hard to comment without giving it away and honestly, you deserve to go into this one cold and experience it yourself.

For the most part, an urban spin on a Daphne DuMaurier style gaslighting tale. We can tell things ain't right but we don't know why or how.

The three leads play it straight - Ashmore and the stunning Ms Lando are more than watchable throughout.

Then, it careers into its final act and it has to be seen to be believed...

Critic proof - a sure fire future cult classic.

A woman visits her parents' house to celebrate the retaking of their marriage vows, but finds that's not the only ritual on the menu.

Trippy, fractured story with stylish symbolism that kept me on my toes to the end. The opening shot carefully lays a trail of clues - not least a word in capital letters - so I knew to keep questioning what was coming at me. There's plenty of mirror-trickery to raise doubts not just about what's going on but also about who the heroine really is, and the broken up sequence of events keeps everything in confusion.

The risk with trippy story-telling is that it leaves the audience stumbling about until we stub our toe and say, Enough. So I was kinda fatigued by the halfway mark, but then the prospect of a dramatic set-piece was introduced and my attention perked up. Was it worth it? Well, I think the end broke off prematurely, probably because the writer had no good idea what the whole thing was about. I certainly didn't get the sense of all the mysteries in the puzzle locking together to reveal a genuine human experience.

The performances are good, and the editing keeps up a decent pace. The camera work dwelled a lot on mirrors, and was otherwise unremarkable. The original score caught my attention with the accordions in the dance scene, but was never switched off and proved distracting in several scenes where the actors were face to face.

It is an unusual take on this sub-genre of horror, but not as engaging as Grace (2014), and I feel the stilted mood of the set-piece reflected a lack of heart in the writing.

Overall: Intriguing but not so engaging.

What could have been a straight forward supernatural thriller has been overdone.

The plot and scenes, too incoherent to enjoy, making you lose interest by the time you get to the end.

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.

Simplistic idea for a film presented in the convoluted nature of amnesia. The film takes slight chances with production leaving much to be desired with the confusion and tension that it needed to be suspenseful. Instead, the musings of what is true were uninspired images that ultimately felt heavy handed. Acting was decent so it wasn't a complete waste. Overall, the way that the plot toyed with us didn't lead to much. And the potential twist at the end wasn't very imaginative. Lackluster effort overall that didn't create much magic in the end. Had potential but something didn't quite blend together for something better.