@rockmarooned Published Feb. 27, 2026, 3:00 p.m. ET Where to Stream: 47 Meters Down Powered by Reelgood More On: thrillers Where Was the ‘Dead of Winter’ Movie Filmed? Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dead of Winter’ on HBO Max, a Goofy B-Thriller Starring Emma Thompson on the Minnesota Ice Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Firebreak’ on Netflix, A Maddening and Manipulative Thriller About a Little Girl Lost in a Wildfire ‘Dead Of Winter’ on HBO Max: Decider’s Top Choice for a Blizzard-Season Streaming Thriller Often when a catalog movie from a few years ago pops on Netflix or other streaming services, it has to do with the star at its center: Certain personalities like Jason Statham or Mark Wahlberg seem to attract viewers’ attention even (or maybe especially) if it’s for a movie that didn’t get much hype upon its original release. But Fall defies those odds. It doesn’t have stars; it barely has any actors at all. (The cast numbers in the area of half a dozen.) It’s about two friends who get stuck really far up high without an obvious way to get rescued, and are afraid that they will… fall.
Taking a page out of the personal-therapy-through-peril guidebook offered by movies like The Shallows, Crawl, and 47 Meters Down, only without any pesky creatures to wrangle (or computer-generate) or showcase Blake Lively performances to goggle at, the movie follows Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and her best friend Shiloh (Virginia Gardner) as they ascend a decommissioned TV tower in the desert. They used to perform these kinds of daredevil fears together all the time, but Becky has given it up (along with most social contact) following the accidental death of her husband (Mason Gooding, from the later Scream movies) in a mountain-climbing accident.
It sounds like bargain-basement made-for-streaming stuff, but Fall was actually a theatrical release back in the summer of 2022. It was even allegedly shot with IMAX in mind, but when Lionsgate actually released it in late summer, there wasn’t much room for IMAX screens to actually show a low-budget height-based survival thriller – which is too bad, because I saw it theatrically and would have loved to experience IMAX-level vertigo. (Imagine watching Alex Honnold scaling mountains in Free Solo or Taipei towers in Skyscraper Live in a venue like that!) Even sitting up close at a multiplex was a little dizzying, and quite effective.
And Fall is nothing if not surprisingly effective. Some of the dialogue is corny, perhaps signaling that the human story at its center will ultimately feel a little facile, with several soap-opera twists of the sort that filmmakers bust out when they might feel insecure about their technical bona fides. But director and co-writer Scott Mann does do an industrious job of simulating enormous height. Gardner and Currey weren’t actually thousands of feet off the ground, but they aren’t obviously acting in front of a green screen, either; the production used visual tricks to film the actors well off the ground, but not dangerously high up, creating a pretty decent illusion. That goes a long way to sell the movie, making the sillier complications, like vulture attacks and perilous drone piloting, easier to buy along with it.
Though Fall was a blast in theaters, and made enough global cash as a low-budget attraction that a sequel has already been filmed, awaiting release sometime this week, it makes sense as Netflix programmer, too, especially in this wintry off-season. Perhaps counterintuitively, there seems to be an audience that’s not yearning for vicarious travelogue escapism, but rather the safety stress of watching someone else in far more confined or trying physical circumstances than their own. One of Fall’s current co-occupants of the Netflix Top 10 movies chart is 10×10, a 2018 thriller that takes place largely within a 10×10 room. If you’re bummed about the weather being too crummy to spend much time outdoors, why not try movies that make your home feel either vastly safer or much more expansive? Maybe that’s the tradeoff for visceral thrills that Fall loses when shrunk down to living room size: the free sense of immediate relief that living room size can provide.
Still, it’s a tricky balance between feeling realistic enough to work as drama and thrilling enough to escape feeling like a hopeless dirge, like the grim Open Water. And it’s no small feat that Fall achieves that balance – especially because of how often its central scenario seems to be outsourced to sharks. Hilariously, Fall co-star Gardner more or less ran this whole scenario back earlier this year with Killer Whale, a shlocky thriller wherein… two friends work out their psychological issues when they’re stranded by a killer whale that basically acts like a shark. It’s The Shallows meets Fall, with Fall specifically acting as permission to circumvent a star performance as compelling as Blake Lively’s in that modern shark classic. But as good as The Shallows is, Fall doesn’t need that kind of force at its center. Better acting might not actually fit so well in its forbidding skyward void. It’s like Shark Week without the sharks – only somehow complimentary.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
