Fall 2: Deadpoint Review: A Working Altitude Movie With a Thin Script

Fall 2: Deadpoint is worth watching if you want the height and can live without the characters. The Spierig brothers moved Scott Mann's survival premise off a desert radio tower and onto an 11,000-foot face in Thailand, and the camera work puts you there so completely that you will feel the drop in your stomach. The script underneath is thin, the drug-running subplot is stapled on late, and the effects show their seams. At 98 minutes it is a watchable B-movie with a patient first act and a final act that finally has something to say.

The business is small. The Numbers has Fall 2: Deadpoint at $5,044,421 domestic and $26,694,950 worldwide, with a $2,320,061 opening weekend. The Guardian's Benjamin Lee explained why the sequel exists at all, noting that the 2022 original cost just $3 million, and Time Out's Hanna Flint reported that it made seven times its budget. Critics split down the middle. Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 53 percent from 59 reviews, and Metacritic sits at 54 from 12 critic reviews.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it for the height, skip it for the characters. A 98-minute, PG-13 survival thriller from the Spierig brothers with Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas, shot in a quarry. Rotten Tomatoes says 53 percent from 59 critic reviews. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Fall 2: Deadpoint is about

Jax Hunter (Harriet Slater) is the younger sister of Shiloh (Virginia Gardner), who died at the top of a radio tower in the first film and became an internet fixture in the process. Jax is selling off her sister's things when Luce turns up to collect the truck, and it is Luce who finds the scrapbook Shiloh used to plan stunts in, the so-called fuck-it list of climbs and dares her sister never got around to doing. The unfinished entry on it is a plank walk around Mount Kwan in Thailand, on the side of an 11,000-foot mountain, ending at a statue of a dragon that is supposed to eat your fears.

Shiloh's friend Luce (Arsema Thomas) suggests the climb as a tribute. Jax, who has no climbing experience and a lot of unfinished grief, agrees. They find a guide in a bar in Thailand, a man called Jon (Tom Brittney), who will take them up a route that is closed, out of season and, as it turns out, also used by drug runners. The rain starts on the way up. A rockslide takes out the planks and separates them from Jon, the backpack with the equipment they need ends up across a gap, and the two women are left on a rotting route called the Devil's Elbow with their guide gone.

The grief is the engine. The climb is what Shiloh would have done, and the film never lets the two women talk about it. What it gives them instead is height, weather and a route that is coming apart, and the film is much better at that.

Cast and performances

Thomas is the best thing in the picture. She plays Luce with the kind of confidence that holds a scene together on its own, and the first half of the film runs on it.

Slater has the harder job, because Jax is meant to be someone who does not know what she is doing for most of the film. The Guardian's Lee flagged the accent work as deliberate and noticed it: "British actor Harriet Slater, faking a solid American accent". Jon is the most interesting man in the film, mostly because Tom Brittney plays him as someone who is always calculating the weather and the risk.

The cast cannot fix the writing. RogerEbert.com's Peter Sobczynski put the problem neatly: "The two leads do as best they can but can't make much of a script that requires them to act like idiots to get from one plot point to another." His next line is the one worth keeping: "Roughly 47% of their dialogue consists of some variation of 'You got this!' 'I've got this!' or 'Don't let go!'" Virginia Gardner returns as Shiloh in the flashbacks and in the old footage Jax keeps watching, and she is the absence the whole film is built around.

What works

The height. George Bate in Screen Rant wrote that the sequel "excels with the same kind of nail-biting, vertiginous thrills that made its predecessor so effective", and added that "anyone with even a moderate fear of heights is likely to be driven to nausea watching the death-defying elevation the characters find themselves at". That is the film's job and it does it.

The set. Flint was plain about the trick: "Shot in a quarry, the VFX effectively establishes the sky-high setting, sending shivers down your spine every time the camera pans to the ground." The mountain has a shape and a weather system, and the route reads clearly even when the geography makes no sense.

The last twenty minutes. William Bibbiani in The Wrap thought the film "really picks up at the end, rescuing a film that could have been just more of the same". The climax is the only part of the picture where the characters do something that resembles a decision.

The guide's scenes with the two women have a wary, transactional rhythm that the rest of the screenplay does not.

What doesn't

The repetition. This is the argument the review turns on. Bibbiani wrote that "you can't really do that twice because there are only so many ways two people can get stuck very high up and only so many conflicts that can arise while they're there", and that Fall 2 "was always going to feel familiar, and to a fault". Flint saw the same thing from the casting side, where the recasting "mostly functions as a copy-and-paste job save". Todd Gilchrist in Variety said the sequel's determination to recreate the original's conflicts and twists "slightly hamstrings what is otherwise an extremely effective thrill ride". Sobczynski's version is the sharpest: the thrills "take way too long to finally kick into gear", are "not particularly thrilling once they start", and "just become repetitive after a while".

The backgrounds. The original had a tower with nothing behind it, so every shot said how high up the characters were. Fall 2 puts the actors against a sheer rock face, and the illusion of exposure often disappears. Bibbiani: "a lot of the time we're looking at two actors filmed against a flat background, which isn't as suspenseful as watching two actors hanging over a precipice." Bate saw the same problem in the effects, which "break the suspension of belief by making it far too clear that the real-life locations are not where the actors filmed the movie".

The drug plot. In a round-up column in The Observer, Wendy Ide said the addition of a drug-running subplot "feels inauthentic, as though crowbarred into the story to up the ante", and The Guardian's Lee thought the series "leans heavily on bland motivational thinking" with a line about fear being something you can control doing a lot of work it cannot do.

The characters. Two people make catastrophically bad decisions and the screenplay treats the mountain as a way to punish them for it. That only works if the audience is on their side, and after a while nobody is.

What audiences say

Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 53 percent from 59 reviews and the Popcornmeter at 63 percent from more than 250 verified ratings. Metacritic's critic split is 17 percent positive, 75 percent mixed and 8 percent negative across 12 reviews, with a user score of 4.6 from 26 ratings. IMDb has the film at 5.3 from 12,000 votes. Letterboxd is the harshest number in it, with a member average of 2.13 from 61,763 ratings and 26,857 written reviews. TMDB has it at 7.26 from 602 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026.

Where to watch Fall 2: Deadpoint

There is no subscription streaming for the film in the United States. JustWatch checked 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and lists it as a digital purchase on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, with no rental and no free streaming option, and TMDB's US provider list agrees. The digital release was October 6, 2026. In the UK it played from September 9, 2026, in Indonesia from September 16, 2026 and in India from September 17, 2026, all on TMDB's calendar, and in Britain it carries the shorter title Fall 2. The US certificate is PG-13 and the runtime is 98 minutes.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Fall 2: Deadpoint streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Fall 2: Deadpoint worth watching? Yes, if you are the sort of person who has seen the first one and want to see the same fear on a bigger face. The camera is good, the fall is real, and the last act has an actual idea in it. If you are looking for new characters, a new situation or a script that respects you, the answer is no. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus says the sequel "ups the stakes without proportionately scaling its characters' intelligence", and the 2.13 on Letterboxd says the people who logged the film came down off the mountain unconvinced. The Spierig brothers made the drop work. They did not make the people on it worth knowing.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Fall 2: Deadpoint

The twist lands late. The woman who has been calling herself Luce is named Billie, and she never met Shiloh at all. She found Shiloh's videos after a terminal cancer diagnosis, wanted the truck Jax was selling, lied about who she was to get it, and then proposed the climb because Shiloh's death had given her a way to spend whatever time she had left. On the mountain, when Jax finds old footage from a group hang, she sees the woman she has been climbing with and understands that the friend she thought she had lost is a stranger wearing a dead girl's friendship.

Jax gets across to the backpack and reaches Jon on the radio, and the film lets the audience believe the rescue is coming. It is not the rescue. The oxygen tanks the clients carry hold fentanyl, and Jon has been running climbers up Mount Kwan as couriers because the mule never gets searched. He has already lost two fingers for a failed run, and he tells Jax that one more failure means he loses his head. He came back for the drugs. The helicopter on the ridge is waiting for the shipment, and the price of the ride out is a package of fentanyl.

Billie will not accept that. She pitches her tank off the mountain and Jon pushes her over the edge for it. What follows is a fight on a bridge that is already failing, and Jon goes over with it. Jax reaches the top, hands over the drugs and flies out. She is the only one of the three who comes down.

The last scene is Jax turning the page of Shiloh's list to another unfinished climb. Then Grace Caroline Currey, who played Becky Connor in the first film, opens her own mailbox and finds an invitation to climb Hell's Chasm to celebrate Shiloh's life. The music turns ominous.