In the dark night of a yellow forest, a masked gang makes its prey fall from a tree. The possessed members take a grim group photograph to celebrate the success of the hunt as if they captured a beast—but it’s a man. The prisoner, also masked, is then thrown into a well with a noose around his neck. The furious running of the rope describes with a mournful hiss the interminable descent until its end disappears into silence. But the man is alive.
Clinging to the rocky walls of the humid hole, he frees himself from the constraints, not from the mask, and with ancestral free solo dexterity begins the long, difficult ascent.
Aired on the BBC unannounced and without credits, The Fall are seven gloomy minutes that grow with each viewing evoking sinister forebodings about our world, about everything we have seen or heard in recent years, and about the kind of human being we have become—the notion of which might still escape us.
Anthony Minghella once said that a short film should be a perfect sentence. The Fall is Jonathan Glazer’s response to that note.
