The human body is only a single component in the craft of extreme sport. In the world of this sport, adrenaline must find a delicate balance with courage. After putting yourself through this experience, the icing on the cake comes when you successfully navigate your way back home. This merely means that you survive by trespassing self-placed boundaries. And suddenly, you are born a new person.
Creator and Director Scott Mann tells us the story of two girls Becky (played by Grace Caroline Currey) and her best friend Hunter (played by Virginia Gardner), who split apart for 52 weeks (approximately a year) when a certain climb they did in the past with Dan, Becky’s husband, goes sour and Dan falls to an inevitable death. This breaks Becky. Her life comes to a complete standstill with her father pleading that she find her way back to a normal life. When Becky is about to overdose with the help of some pills, Hunter calls her on the phone to tell her that she is on her way to meet her. When they meet, Hunter can see her friend ailing and hurting. She takes her first step towards reconciliation to help Becky find her way back to her normal self by telling her there is another sporting event they have to try.
The film pulls us on a journey with two girls trying to summit the top of a 2000-foot tall TV tower. This tall tower is situated in a desert. Rusty and coming apart, the screws are already loose, ready to spring off the moment a bit of pressure is applied. But this climb provides a dual purpose. For Becky to spread her lost husband’s ashes and to find her willpower to circumnavigate back to normalcy. Circumstances begin to take vicious turns as the suspense builds and we learn the brutal lessons of survival through Becky’s journey. Without any more delay, let us learn how Becky fulfills these two purposes.
Fall 2023 Plot Summary: Why do the girls decide to climb a 2000-foot-tall TV Tower?
Hunter has found a new passion in being an Instagram influencer. Climbing a 2000-foot-tall TV tower is a new way to personify her passion for extreme sport and the next step to attain more fame and glory. On the previous evening before the climb, they stop at a restaurant for dinner, where Hunter teaches Becky a new way to charge her phone by connecting her charger to the leads of the table lamp. The next day, the girls set out towards the Tower. The locked gate stops them from entering the area of the tower with their car. After walking towards the tower, they come across a pack of vultures picking up a half-dead coyote. An ominous symbol that death is apparent and for what is to come.
When the girls reach the foot of the tower, they start climbing the internal ladder. Becky begins to feel a rising sense of anxiety and Hunter tells her she cannot keep doing this to herself. She reminds her of what Becky will feel at the top of the Tower. The creators do well to show us what might come after by showing how shaky the structure is and that there is a possibility that the girls may not return to the ground. For the sake of sanity, Becky is not wrong to feel like she is doing the impossible.
The girls reach the end of the internal ladder, which leads to a platform. From there, they must climb another 200 feet until they reach the top of the tower. As Becky and Hunter climb up the ladder, unbeknownst to them, one of the bolts comes loose. As the girls slowly ascend their climb to the top of the tower, they manage to spread Dan’s ashes. This marks an emotional moment that hits both Becky and Hunter hard. But this is also a moment where Becky notices how Hunter truly feels about Dan.
What happens when Hunter decides to go down first before Becky?
After some tomfoolery, they decide to start climbing back down. As Becky starts her descent, the unscrewed part of the ladder comes loose, causing the entire ladder to topple and fall to the ground. It also causes Becky to drop the bag containing their drone and water bottle on top of one of the satellite dishes attached below. Hunter manages to pull Becky up using the harness of rope. This desperate pull of the rope to save Becky’s life causes a large gash on her knee. On seeing the wound, Hunter helps her to stop bleeding by making a tourniquet. After scrambling to find something to call for help, they find a flare gun and binoculars in the compartment at the base of the tower.
While stuck at the top of the tower, they begin to wonder how to call for help. They both check their phones. Becky and Hunter cannot find a signal rendering their phones useless. Five hours pass and no one has heard the ladder crash. No one is coming. The two of them use their binoculars to survey the land below them and see a trailer parked, near the gate. They both decide to type a message and hit send, so when they lower the phone, the phone catches a signal and the message reaches the receiver.
After a feeble attempt at grasping two men’s attention who reside in a trailer near the tower on the ground, the phone breaks after the dog spots the phone. The girls finally wait until dark before launching the flare from the flare gun and attracting their attention. Unfortunately, instead of driving the trailer to help them drive up to the gate, the men stole the car they had parked there.
After these many hours stuck on top of a tower in the blaring heat of the day, the girls are getting anxious and dehydrated. As charged emotions flare up, Becky watches a video of her and Dan’s wedding and notices Hunter’s gloomy face in the video. The tattoo emblazoned on Hunter’s ankle ‘1 4 3’ forces Becky to confront Hunter by revealing to her that Dan had trouble proclaiming he loved her, choosing to say those three numbers instead. Ashamed, Hunter admits to having had an affair with Dan for four months, initiated by Dan after a drunken encounter. It forced Hunter to distance herself from Becky after Dan’s death because she had broken off the affair with Dan as she valued her friendship with Becky by a mile.
On the following day, they finally acknowledge that the phone is broken and no one is coming, Hunter decides to climb down first to the satellite dish and try to retrieve the bag containing the water and the drone. With the strength of the harness, she lowers herself to the top of the satellite dish and manages to jump to the other dish and retrieve the bag. Hunter uses the selfie stick to reach the harness and manages to reach up. As she starts climbing up, Becky begins pulling her from the top, Hunter appears to slip and fall to the dish. Becky, terrified, manages to peek down and sees her still alive, albeit her hands are profusely injured. But Becky manages to pull her up. Is this Becky’s reality or Hunter’s reality?
Fall 2022 Ending Explained: How does Becky find her way back home?
After having pulled Hunter up, Becky has an idea to try and deliver a piece of paper using the drone to the motel where they had stayed the night before, but the battery starts running out, which forces them to retrieve the drone. Becky remembers Hunter’s trick of charging the phone via the lamp leads and climbs up to the port where the tower’s night light is attached. Her wounded leg is already starting to smell and the vultures are circling. She manages to unscrew the light and connect the drone’s charger with the leads and her marriage ring as a conduit. As the drone charges slowly, Becky holds on for dear life throughout the night, barely dodging the vultures smelling blood from her wounded leg.
The drone is charged fully and the girls attach the piece of paper to the drone to fly it over the gate towards the motel. But as tough luck would have it, a truck crashes into the drone and destroys it, shattering their hopes of ever sending a message. Becky soon starts to lose herself from delirium and dehydration, almost falling from the platform. She finally asks Hunter for her other shoe, so she can drop her phone and ask for help. But Hunter coolly replies that she doesn’t have the shoes because she isn’t here in the first place.
Lo and behold, we learn that Hunter died when she slipped and fell onto the dish. She bled out from the side of her face and the vultures were feasting on her. Just like that delirious dream Becky had already. In reality, Becky had only managed to pull up the bag. Doppelganger Hunter had been helping Becky after going down to retrieve the bag only proved to be a figment of her imagination. This further emphasizes that Becky survival instincts were pushing her in an illusionary manner to show her a doppelganger of Hunter who was at Becky’s side after climbing back up to the platform, who just happened to be more cautious, trying to provide Becky with moral support by talking about wrestling- something only Becky knows to be a hobby of hers- or how Hunter convinced Becky to climb up the tower to connect the drone’s charger, to make Becky manage to survive.
After this level of shock, Becky falls unconscious, dehydrated, hungry and exhausted. A vulture finally starts inching closer to Becky’s leg, it starts to nibble at the flesh of her open wound. When she opens her eyes, Becky manages to catch the vulture by the throat and wring its neck, killing it. She eats the flesh of the bird to find her strength. She manages to connect herself to the harness and pull herself down to the dish, where Hunter’s dead body lies dead. The vultures have taken apart her stomach exposing it further. The vulture nibbling Hunter’s flesh looks up at Becky’s bloodstained face and flies away, realizing it has found it’s equal. Becky, with hot tears of grief, whispers that she loves Hunter, types a message to her father, inserts the phone inside Hunter’s shoe, stuffs the shoe in Hunter’s exposed stomach, and then pushes Hunter’s body off the satellite dish.
Towards the end, we see Becky’s father, James, driving toward the tower to reach the base to see police cars and paramedics already present. His heart sinks when he sees a dead body being carted off by the paramedics, but he finally sees Becky. The film ends with our Daddy’s girl in a happy union with her father.
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