The Free Fall – Film Review

A  young woman named Sara (Andrea Londo) wakes from a coma to a life she doesn’t remember; a fragile, slippery reality that spirals into a nightmare where nothing is as it seems.

If you’re a filmmaker and you craft something that starts off genuinely interesting and suspenseful, only for the story to go completely off the rails toward the end – I hate to break it to you, but your movie overall is still not good. While watching Adam Stilwell‘s new film The Free Fall, it was immediately clear to me that he was a talented director. The only thing he needed in order for The Free Fall to work was a good script, and sadly, this movie doesn’t really have one.

This is without a doubt one of the most frustrating movies I’ve seen in quite some time because virtually nothing in this movie is horrible. At all. In fact, there are some moments in here that are genuinely impressive and some that subverted my expectations. When The Free Fall actually aims at being a legitimate psychological horror thriller, it succeeds. But when the film focuses on literally anything else, it honestly becomes quite boring.

And not to mention that this story just isn’t original, either. Screenwriter Kent Harper did next to nothing in terms of freshening up this otherwise tired and formulaic script – one where you can see all the “twists” coming a mile away. Plus, I noticed rather quickly just how similar this movie felt to Jordan Peele‘s Get Out which is kind of hilarious considering one of the executive producers on that film worked on The Free Fall.

By the time the film came to a close, I was praying that I would learn something of interest. I wanted something legitimately surprising to happen to make me even just a little bit impressed but that never happened. But also, as I mentioned earlier, this film isn’t one of those movies that’s horrible in any way, but rather, one where you can’t help but see missed opportunities around every corner.

Andrea Londo delivers an incredibly strong and emotionally layered performance as Sara, who always feels on top of everything throughout the film, despite her having woken up from a coma. Shawn Ashmore is also terrific in the role of Nick, who actually kind of gave me the creeps because of his performance here. Everybody else involved with the movie was good too, but Londo and Ashmore are definitely the top two standouts.

I wish I could say that Adam Stilwell’s The Free Fall impressed me more than it did. It had the foundations to be a gripping and emotionally compelling psychological horror-thriller but, instead, it constantly settles for mediocrity.