The Film to Stream Right Now: The Fall

For close to a year, I’ve scrolled through my MUBI library, engaged in that familiar pastime of passively looking for something to watch. I’ve gone past the Rohrwatchers and Reichardts added to my watchlist, glanced, mildly arrested at a banner featuring a man in a tricorn hat over a furrowed burrow against a blood-red background, and moved on from fearing it to be a Jodorowskian fever dream. I’ve then gone on to play an episode of Mussolini: Son of the Century.

But little have I known that in order to watch one of history’s most power-crazed-dictator plots, I’ve let go of the chance to watch one of cinema’s most fascinating and surreal evil-despot-revenge plots.

Earlier this week, as my comprehension gave up before the unending deluge of glowing paeans and hot takes for The Odyssey, I finally stopped fighting. I tapped on the play button with the tricorn-hatted man in the background. And thus began a beguiling menagerie of costumes and colours.

Directed by Tarsem Singh, who also made stunning star-crossed 2023 romance Dear Jassi, it is not a story of a brave warrior on a treacherous homeward journey. It is, however, a whimsical tale of five warriors (one of them, playing a silent brooder named The Indian, is the actor Jeetu Verma) hungry for revenge on the evil Governor Odious.

Singh draws upon the surrealism of Soviet-era director Sergei Parajanov and peppers it with the light-footed tonal imagery of Wes Anderson to tell a cockle-warming story.

And much like The Odyssey, it’s not about a story. It is about the teller.

The plot takes off, circa 1920, in a Los Angeles hospital, where its principal characters, the cherubic Alexandria and the handsome Roy are admitted after their respective injuries. One day, while chasing her own childhood games, Alexandria wanders into Roy’s ward. A stuntman in silent-era Hollywood, he begins to tell the restless child a story.

Searching for Governor Odious, the men go from one adventure to the next. Alexandria’s vivid imagination and Roy’s fateful affiliation with cinema constantly shape and alter the plot. Especially as the stuntman meanders and constantly walks his own state of weakening, morphine-addled concentration into the events of the story he’s telling. Dan Gilroy’s (Nightcrawler and Roman J. Israel, Esq) screenplay constructs a delightfully surreal sequence of events right out of a Terry Gilliam film.

And these events are punctuated by the conditions of the present day. Compensation settlement executives visit Roy. Her hand suspended perpendicularly mid-air in a cast, Alexandria waltzes around the hospital, licking ice off blocks, drawing the masked bandit of the story and nicking morphine for her friend in pain. The immigrant’s scattered English is the broken English of Romanian child actor Catinca Untaru, and it was something Singh insisted on keeping.

In a cinema moment ruled singularly by the IMAX experience Christopher Nolan continues to pursue with The Odyssey, The Fall offers a distinct, parallel wash of enthrallment. And that’s because this is a gorgeous film, yawing wildly from the cloud dappled peaks of the Mongolian desert to the unreal blueness of the Pacific Ocean.

That’s because The Fall, shot painstakingly across twenty-three countries—I spell the number out because that is no mean feat—is a film that stresses uniquely on something that’s fast losing relevance in art: labours of love. Promotional material for the film triumphantly declares zero use of computer-generated imagery, studio sets or green screens—its stunning landscapes were all collected from Namibia, Fiji, Italy, China, India over four years. Singh is said to have spent everything he had earned making music videos and advertisements, often taking up jobs in the places he wanted to shoot this film. And it was thus that The Fall was born.

Not to vacuously eulogise excess, but even as filmmakers and film studios give into the corporate cost-saving afforded by AI, it feels essential to fully take in the work that went into a work of art. To be able to process the enormous task of moving locations and setting up impossible-seeming shots. A cross-dissolve where the face of the “stony-faced priest” morphs into a desert landscape. The butterfly island on which our band of warriors is imprisoned at the beginning of the film. The mind-boggling scale of the stepwell, with an advancing army, that the character Charles Darwin is left to face towards the end of the movie.

Last year, having newly received a 4K restoration after being virtually impossible to track down for two decades, the film came to MUBI India. The 4K restoration premiered at Locarno and began streaming on MUBI on September 27, 2024, in the US, Canada, Latin America, the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Benelux, Turkey and India.