The Falling

Review by BigBadWolfBoy

One of the best compliments I can give Nicholas Gyeney’s 2006 super-low budget fallen angel thriller The Falling is that I sat through its entire 114 minutes of shot-on-HD-video craziness not just once, not even twice, but three times. I watched it the first time and was impressed- not necessarily by what was on the screen so much as by what writer/director Gyeney was attempting to do with the material. It made me curious about the production, and so I sat through both of Gyeney’s commentary tracks. I used to listen to commentaries all the time, but I’ve slowly lost my patience for them after wasting hours listening to tracks full of boring, self-congratualtory blather. Seriously, have you tried to listen to a Tim Burton commentary track? If you have, let me know the approximate time you dozed off so we can see which of us has more stamina!

Oi, I’m getting off track. The point is that The Falling, for all its failings (and I will get to them shortly), is an example of a movie that quite refreshingly finds a way to tell a complex story in an interesting way while staying within a limited budget. Gyeney and his crew seem to have said, "So what if we have no money! We can make this work! Let’s make a movie about angels and the devil, and we’ll have a sword fight and a shootout in a garage and a car chase and a couple of fistfights, and we’ll have characters emerging from bubbling lake, and we’ll make them wear funky contact lenses, and it’ll be a blast!"

And the thing is, a lot of it does work.

It seems Lucifer has escaped Hell and plans on crawling his way up to Earth. A group of five angels arrive to try to stop him from wreaking his patented brand of red-eyed havoc. Thing is, the angels are afraid to act against him directly for fear of starting an apocalyptic war. This is what I found most interesting about the story. Lucifer does arrive, and the angels don’t interfere. Even when the horned one gets busy doing his evil thing, the angels stand around and simply watch him. It’s an interesting commentary on good vs evil; on walking the line between risk and action. There’s a scene where Lucifer goes after a priest being guarded by angel leader Michael, and rather than start a war, Michael gives up the priest. I tell you, it’s a good thing angels don’t have people-parts, cuz at the end of that scene Michael is one emasculated angel.

The angels have a plan to enlist the aid of cop, grant him power, and let him take down Lucifer. This leads to a final battle, and a suprising ending that sets up an inevitable sequel. Which is fine, because it’s not a ‘stinger’ type of set-up, so much as an indicator that Gyeney has planned a much larger arc, of which The Falling is just the beginning.

The camerawork is handheld, and as a result Gyeney pulls off some fun shots and interesting angles. Some of the acting, particularly by leads Scott Gabelein (as a cop) and Michael Ayden (as Lucifer), is well done. Ayden, in particular, really shines. This is quite an accomplishment given that it’s his first acting gig ever.

Thought is given to shot composition, as when an older priest is filmed from a very low angle, so that all we see is him and the huge, puffy-clouded blue sky behind him to symbolize his piety. Editing is slick and professional, and the music is appropriately orchestral.

The fistfight sequences at the end are quite well done, as well, which is something that films of this budget rarely get right. Gyeney has some directorial chops, and it will be interesting to see if he does pull off what he talks about on the commentary tracks, which is to remake the movie with a much larger budget in a few years.

Okay. Now for the bad. As much as I admire what Gyeney was going for, and as much as I applaud him for many of his directorial choices, in the end the movie IS a very low-budget video affair and sometimes it really shows.

First off, outside of the performances I mentioned earlier, much of the casting left me cold. In particular, none of the five angels seemed at all like angels. Zero personality for the lot of them. Part of this is a script that requires them to do nothing, but still. They were dull and blank and uninteresting. Even Archangel Michael, who gets the most screen time and the most to do, seems like a kid playing grown-up more than a heavenly being.

The look of the characters, overall, is The Falling’s single biggest problem. None of these actors (except for Ayden, who is from England) seem ancient; they all look like what they are- kids from Seattle acting in a HD video movie. It’s tough to buy into any of them in this material.

Other scenes simply fall flat. There’s an action scene where our hero cop somehow runs a distance of about 100 feet to the window of a SUV in broad daylight while a badguy is shooting directly at him, and yet he manages to knock out the baddie without being shot.

There’s also an assassination early in the film that is awkwardly put together. A commentary track explains why (someone forgot to bring a prop gun that day) but it still hurts the film.

Low budget lighting issues abound. Dialogue gets heavy-handed and clunky.

Still, I was quite impressed with The Falling. It’s not a horror movie by any means, and it does reach a little farther than it can grasp. But I’d rather it be that than a movie that doesn’t try at all. I hope Gyeney does get his big budget remake, because I’m interested in seeing where the story goes.