THIS IS MID-DIALOG, WHERE I RAISED THE COMPARISON OF "DUEL" AND "FALL". For the original start of dialog, see futher below.
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FALL, about two women trapped on a high desert radio tower, seems to remind me of the Steven Spielberg movie called DUEL because it is a paradoxical mix of claustrophobic and wide open.
The truck movie takes place in a wide open desert, yet it feels claustrophobic because much of it is filmed inside the car which is very small and always has the truck on its tail in the rearview mirror. So it is a mix of helicopter shots of wide open desert and great claustrophobic terror. Similarly, in the movie FALL, they are high in space and surrounded by nothing but air and sky, and it feels claustrophobic because this is all filmed within a few feet of the actors faces and bodies on the tiny platform. Contrast and compare.
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Yes — that is a very sharp comparison, and I think you’ve put your finger on the key formal paradox in both films.
Both Duel and Fall are built on a tension between openness of setting and imprisonment of experience. Duel takes place on open roads in broad daylight across empty desert and scrubland, yet Spielberg repeatedly traps us inside David Mann’s subjective space: the car interior, the windshield frame, the side mirror, the rearview mirror, the speedometer, the panicked glances. Critics and commentators have long noted how much of the film’s suspense comes from POV driving shots and from the truck’s recurring presence in mirrors rather than from any ornate plotting. (citizencant.com)
Fall uses the same contradiction in a vertical form. The women are surrounded by immense empty sky, but that openness does not feel freeing; it feels like the absence of all escape routes. Reviews emphasized exactly this effect: wide and overhead shots establish terrifying exposure, while the film then cuts back into the cramped bodily space of a tiny platform, keeping the suspense close to faces, hands, feet, and the corroded metal around them. (Roger Ebert)
So the two films share a structural trick:
maximum physical openness, maximum psychological enclosure. (citizencant.com)
But they achieve it in slightly different ways.
In Duel, the claustrophobia is created by pursuit. The road is open, but David Mann is never free because the truck occupies his mental field. Even when it is not literally bumper-to-bumper, it invades the frame as menace: in the mirror, in the sound design, in his anticipatory panic. And because Spielberg keeps the truck driver largely unseen, the threat becomes strangely abstract and omnipresent, almost less a person than a system or force. That helps make the desert feel not liberating but exposed and inescapable. (Hagerty UK)
In Fall, the claustrophobia is created not by pursuit but by immobility. Nobody is chasing them. The prison is the platform itself. The enormous surrounding space makes their confinement feel harsher, because every inch beyond the platform is unusable void. In Duel, the hero can keep moving but cannot shake the terror. In Fall, the heroine cannot move at all except within a space of a few feet. That is why the film feels both aerial and suffocating. (Roger Ebert)
There is also a nice contrast in how the films use scale.
In Duel, the truck is huge relative to the car. The visual drama is based on disproportion: one small vulnerable machine harried by one enormous brutal machine. The landscape stays horizontal and the danger keeps arriving from behind or alongside. In Fall, the human body is tiny relative to the tower and the sky. The scale shock is not lateral but vertical. Instead of being dwarfed by another vehicle, the characters are dwarfed by altitude itself. (citizencant.com)
The result is that Duel is about pressure, while Fall is about exposure.
Duel: compression, pursuit, tailgating, mechanical aggression. (citizencant.com)
Fall: precariousness, vertigo, thirst, bodily vulnerability, dead air around the body. (Roger Ebert)
Another difference is in the emotional texture. Duel is paranoid. The world feels irrational because the attack has no clear motive. Fall is more survivalist and corporeal. Its fear is less “Why is this happening to me?” and more “How long can the body endure this?” That is why Duel feels like a nightmare of modern mobility, whereas Fall feels like an ordeal movie with horror mechanics. (Senses of Cinema)
But your larger point holds beautifully: both films understand that cinematic claustrophobia does not require walls. In fact, sometimes the absence of walls is worse. A tiny car in a huge desert and a tiny platform in a huge sky both become traps because the camera teaches us to feel the characters’ usable world shrinking to almost nothing. (citizencant.com)
So I’d put it this way:
Duel is claustrophobia inside motion.
Fall is claustrophobia inside exposure.
And both rely on the same cinematic paradox: the more open the world becomes, the more imprisoned the protagonist can feel.
If you like, I can also compare Fall to Open Water, which uses almost the exact same formal paradox, but with the sea instead of the sky.
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ORIGINAL START HERE:
There was an Indie horror movie a year or two ago about two people, I want to say two girls, who climb a very high tower, several hundred feet high, and then the ladder breaks, and they are trapped up there, and they have no food or water and their cell phones die. If I recall, one girl is rescued at the end.
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You’re almost certainly thinking of Fall (2022).
It’s about two young women who climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV/radio tower, the ladder gives way, and they end up stranded at the top with almost no supplies. By the end, one survives and is rescued. (Wikipedia)
A few details in your memory line up especially well:
two women
very high tower
ladder breaks
trapped without food/water
phone problems
one rescued at the end (Wikipedia)
One small correction: it was 2022, so about 3–4 years ago, not just one or two. (Wikipedia)
The tower in the film was inspired by the real Walnut Grove broadcast tower in California. (Wikipedia)
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