Fall 2: Deadpoint ditches the tower for a real mountain nightmare

Fall 2: Deadpoint hits theaters this week, and directors Michael and Peter Spierig made one thing clear from the start — no towers. The sequel to 2022's surprise horror-thriller hit Fall swaps the iconic broadcast tower for China's Huashan Plank Walk, a real-world cliffside trail that is, by any reasonable measure, terrifying.

"We didn't wanna make it a tower or anything similar to the first film," Peter Spierig tells Polygon. "There was just no point of going there again." Instead of repeating the original's single-location tension, the Spierigs built a faux cliffside set inside a quarry — only about 40 feet off the ground — and shot as much as possible on location with real sunlight, wind machines, and rain. Actors Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas, playing Jax and Luce, walked actual physical planks. The crew was baffled. "We had a lot of crew members ask, 'Why did you do this!?'" Peter says. Michael's answer is simple: "When you go to the movies, you want an experience. You don't want to feel like you've been ripped off." The production also built a camera rig onto the actors to replicate the GoPro point-of-view style familiar from climbing videos and social media — because if your movie is called Fall 2, the falling had better look real.

The Huashan Plank Walk setting gives the film something the first movie structurally couldn't offer: lateral movement. Jax and Luce aren't stuck waiting for rescue — they're navigating rotten planks, slippery surfaces, and falling rock across a mountain. That physical variety supports a more emotionally layered story too, with Slater's Jax processing the death of her sister Shiloh from the first film. Deadpoint is designed to stand alone, but it also sets up Fall 3, which remains Scott Mann's project — the writer-director of the original. The Spierigs consulted on the third installment. "It's Scott's trilogy," Michael says.

Fall 2: Deadpoint is in theaters now. With a third film already in development and the Spierigs handing the reins back to Mann, the franchise is shaping up as a proper trilogy built around real-world vertigo rather than CGI spectacle.