Fall - definitely the most stressful 107 minutes you'll ever spend in a cinema

Well, the summer’s certainly ending on a high – a terrifying one, 2,000ft up an abandoned radio mast where two thrill-seekers, up there for various reasons, find themselves absolutely stuck. If you are looking for uncomfortably the least relaxing 107 minutes you will ever spend in a cinema, this is most definitely your moment.

There’s a slight silliness about the whole thing, for sure, but there is also undeniable brilliance about the way director Scott Mann carries it off, masterminding the cinematic white-knuckle ride of the year, a film which will have you appreciating terra firma like you have never done before.

Fall starts with a fall. Becky (Grace Fulton) and her husband Dan (Mason Gooding) are merrily scampering up a dizzyingly sheer rockface when Becky’s best mate Hunter (Virginia Gardner) scampers up past them even more merrily. Soon afterwards (and not connected) Dan plunges to his death, plunging Becky into boozy bereavement and despair.

And it’s Hunter, by now a YouTube dare devil, who comes to her rescue. Urging her to face up to her fears, she comes up with the wizard wheeze that they should climb an abandoned radio mast in the middle of nowhere. Initially reluctant, Becky realises it would be the perfect place to scatter Dan’s ashes – so up they scurry, a reasonably straightforward trip to the top (though they don’t even bother taking an extra layer – my late grandmother would be appalled).

But the vultures are circling, support lines are quivering, bolts are wobbling, metal is corroded and you know it’s all going to go horribly, horribly wrong. They reach their “pizza-sized platform” only for the top of the ladder to shear off leaving them completely stranded.

They are highly-trained and hugely ingenious and together they start to do whatever they can. One by one their plans fail, each new failure met by the hopeful refrain “I’ve got an idea.”

Of course, it stretches all credibility, but that hardly matters given the stomach-churning tension of it all – and boy, does director Scott Mann ramp it up superbly. He’s given his girls the smallest possible stage on which to perform, but they perform superbly – even if their conversation is occasionally bewilderingly calm.

And those are the moments where you start to ponder why anyone would put a ladder on the side of the mast in the first place; or indeed why there’s a screw-fit light bulb at the very top of the tower. Watch out for the biggest implausibility of them all, though. It turns out that it’s actually the film’s cleverest moment.

Perhaps, the ending, when it comes, comes just a little too quickly, but this is still a cracking film, at times almost unwatchable, utterly mesmerising and bound to return in your nightmares! And when you think of the tiny, tiny budget it was made with compared to the mega-bucks behind the superhero epics, you realise that Fall’s great virtue is that director Scott Mann really understands just precisely what it is that makes a film grip.