Tucked into the news about what’s showing at Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival is a detail of note to lovers of a certain incredible movie: A 4K restoration and director’s cut of Tarsem Singh’s The Fall will make its world premiere at said festival.
Does anyone know a cheap way to get to Switzerland? Nah? Then I guess I’ll just have to be patient. Presumably, if said film is world premiering at a festival next month, it will eventually make its way to us lesser mortals.
The Fall, for the uninitiated, was released in 2008 in the U.S. and seen by not a ton of people—but those of us who saw it had a transformative experience. Lee Pace stars as Roy Walker, an injured stuntman who, while pining over a woman he can’t have, begins spinning stories for a young girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru). The film blends their ordinary existence with incredibly filmed versions of the stories, shot on location all over the world.
Notably, one of the movie’s writers was Dan Gilroy, who is now better known as the writer of Nightcrawler and—more relevantly, around these parts—for Andor; he wrote three of the first season’s episodes.
The Fall is my favorite movie, full stop. For the 10th anniversary of the film’s release, I wrote an essay about it: “Ten Years Later, There’s Still Nothing Like Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.” And there still isn’t. Intimate, epic, stunning, unexpected, it is the epitome of the experience I want to have when I go to the movies.
And now there’s a director’s cut! We will be watching the skies—and the internet—to find out where else it will be screening.
