Okay, let’s jump into the second of the Tarsem films I love. I wrote about The Cell a little while back, and I talked about Tarsem Singh. I talked about his visual language and his collaboration with costume designer Eiko Ishioka, and I said he was someone who made insanely visual films. The Cell was a great introduction film into his world. But it was an easy one to get into. A serial killer mystery thriller. I tend to enjoy that type of film. The question is what he would do for number two. Well, we had to wait seven years for it. And when he made it it was not a cookie-cutter copy of The Cell. The Fall is something else entirely. The Fall is the film in which he masters everything. The visuals, the story, and the practical insanity of how it was made. I don’t recall the first time seeing it, as I am sure this is me living in California, working at Hollywood Video. It is 2006, and I know I am watching like a hawk for his next film. My best guess is I had gotten a bootleg DVD copy of it, because in the very beginning of this film’s release, it was impossible to get. But enough of the back story. I am going to attempt to write about this masterpiece. Honestly, I am not sure I am smart enough to do it justice. But I am going to try.
Here is what is happening on the surface. It is 1915 in Los Angeles. A stuntman named Roy Walker, played by Lee Pace, is lying in a hospital bed. He jumped off a bridge for a film, and something went wrong. He may never walk again. His girlfriend has left him for the actor he was doubling for. He is in a bad place. A young girl named Alexandria, played by a six-year-old Romanian child actress named Catinca Untaru (I have checked the spelling 30 times), is in the same hospital recovering from a broken arm. She is a Romanian immigrant, her English is not great, and she is very curious about who she is sharing the hospital ward with. She is nosy and ventures to see Roy. They meet, and Roy begins to tell her a story. The story is about five legendary heroes traveling the world to take revenge on an evil governor named Odious. And as he tells it, we see it. Crazy. The story plays out in locations that could not possibly exist, in costumes that look like nothing in the history of cinema, in landscapes so otherworldly you keep reminding yourself that none of this is computer-generated. It is all real. Every single frame. But here is what is actually happening underneath the story. Roy is not telling Alexandria this tale to entertain her. He is trying to manipulate her. He wants her to sneak into the pharmacy and steal enough morphine for him to end his life. And the film is about what happens when those two things collide. a man who wants to die and the force and drive of a child who does not yet understand what death is. And that is where I will leave the plot. I will not tell you where it goes. But I will tell you it earns every single thing it does. Like insanely brilliant.
Now the cast. Lee Pace is Roy Walker, and this is the performance that made him. He had one notable film credit before this, Soldier’s Girl, where he played a transgender woman and received a Golden Globe nomination for it. That was it. Nobody knew who he was. And Tarsem built the entire film around it, which I will explain shortly. What Pace does here is hold two completely different things in the same performance across the whole movie: the entertainer who is spinning this girl a world, and the broken man under it all who is using her. And honestly, the jumping between both is amazing. Peter Jackson saw this film and immediately cast him as Thranduil in The Hobbit. That is how good he is in it. He is also fantastic as Ronan in a few Marvel films and more recently, amazing in the Glen Powell’s The Running Man. Not as good as Arnold’s but just as much fun. And then there is Catinca Untaru ( I checked again) as Alexandria, and I do not have enough words. I should start by saying I despise films with kids. Kind of an immediate no-go for me, but this director is a must-watch, so I pushed forward. Catinca was six years old in this. She barely spoke English. And her performance is one of the most authentic things I have ever seen a child do on screen. I am sometimes watching this and am convinced she thinks this is all real. Like not a movie, that is how perfectly she plays the role. There is a scene near the end of this movie involving her and Pace that absolutely destroyed me, and I will not say another word about it. As a Dad of two girls, I lose it more than I did in 2006. Justine Waddell plays Evelyn, the nurse, and she is wonderful as a kind person who exists in both the real world and the fantasy version that Alexandria imagines when she pictures the story. The whole ensemble across the fantasy sequences is tremendous, wild, and epic. Just wait until you meet the version of Charles Darwin that lives in this film.
Now, the crew, and this is where I want to spend real time, because the story of how this movie got made is almost as extraordinary as the movie itself. The director is Tarsem Singh. He had been making commercials and music videos for sixteen years. He was using every single one of those jobs as location scouting opportunities for this film. Every country he traveled to for an advertisement, he was quietly tracking to build a visual library for The Fall. He had been working on this movie since he was in film school. The screenplay is co-written by Tarsem, Dan Gilroy, and Nico Soultanakis. Dan Gilroy, you may know as the writer and director of Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal, which I rather enjoyed. I read that he deferred his fee on this for years, waiting for financing. The film is presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze, meaning they championed it and helped get it made after it went through years of rejection from studios that did not understand it. The costume designer is again Eiko Ishioka, and if The Cell was a preview of what she could do, The Fall is the full monty. The costumes in the fantasy sequences are so elaborate, strange, and amazing that they add another level of visuals to the already insane visuals. Did I say visuals enough? She and Tarsem were creative partners until her death in 2012. And here is the biggest thing about this film that will blow your mind watching this in 2026 or whenever you find this article. There is not a single frame of computer-generated imagery in this movie. Everything you see is real. Every location is a real place on this planet. It was shot in over twenty countries across four years. India, Namibia, South Africa, Argentina, Indonesia, Italy, Turkey, Fiji, Bolivia, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, and more. I think I named the main ones. An example of the level of detail and visuals this director had is that Tarsem provided blue paint to the residents of Jodhpur in India, so they could repaint their houses for a sequence. That is the level of commitment we are talking about. Absolutely amazing.
My favorite part of any film I review is the quotes. Some very solid memorable ones in this one.
“What a mystery this world, one day you love them and the next day you want to kill them a thousand times over.” – Masked Bandit
“It was the natural order of things… all things must die.” – Roy
“That story was just a trick to get you to do something for me.” – Roy
“I don’t like this story!” – Alexandria
That last one. In context. You will understand.
This film had one of the biggest distribution disasters in film. It premiered in Toronto in 2006. Supposedly, Harvey Weinstein walked out after fifteen minutes and passed on it because he said he could not follow the plot, and then reportedly tried to sabotage it afterward. It did not get released in the US until 2008. And for years after that, it was essentially impossible to find. No streaming, second-hand DVDs selling for insane prices. Not anymore. Amazon Prime has it to rent for five bucks. I own this film because it just has to be owned. As I promise with all my film reviews I will gladly pay the five bucks back. But if you have any wanting for something unlike anything else that you have ever seen, please go watch this film. Roger Ebert called it one of the best films of 2008. Honestly, in my opinion, it is one of the best films ever made. Fingers crossed this article piques your interest in it, and hopefully I did it justice.
Fun Facts:
- Lee Pace spent most of the production pretending to be actually paralyzed. Tarsem pitched him on the idea before filming began, inspired by the French film Ponette, where a young child was made to believe the events on screen were real. He wanted Catinca Untaru ( Not easy to spell) to genuinely believe Roy could not walk. Only a handful of crew members knew the truth. The fantasy scenes where Roy walks and rides horses were explained to the rest of the cast and crew as being performed by a Romanian actor named Emil, who was playing the Masked Bandit. Most of them never put it together that it was Pace the whole time. I mean, at the time, Lee Pace was unknown, so who would have really figured it out?
- I read, as I said earlier, that Harvey Weinstein walked out of the first test screening after fifteen minutes and passed on distributing it, saying he could not understand what was happening. Tarsem said in a 2024 interview that Weinstein then tried to actively sabotage the film’s distribution for years afterward. The film was eventually picked up by Roadside Attractions and had a small theater release in 2008. It then disappeared for fifteen years before MUBI bought it and released the 4K restoration in late 2024 (that is what I got). Weinstein walked out after fifteen minutes of one of the most visually beautiful films ever made. I feel like that kind of says it all.
