Who's the villain in Fall 2: Deadpoint? Jax and Luce brought him up the mountain themselves
The deadliest thing on the mountain in Fall 2: Deadpoint is the man two climbers paid $5,000 to keep them safe on it.
Fall 2: Deadpoint opened in theaters on September 2 from Lionsgate. It's the sequel to 2022's Fall, in which two friends climbed a 2,000-foot TV tower and one of them, Shiloh Hunter, didn't come down. Peter and Michael Spierig directed it from a script by Scott Mann, who made the first film, and Jonathan Frank. Harriet Slater plays Jax, Shiloh's older sister, and Arsema Thomas plays Luce, the friend who talks her into a climb in Shiloh's memory: a plank walk along the face of Mount Kwan in Thailand.
How they find him
The trip starts from Shiloh's own notes. Her scrapbook points the two women to a bar, where the right phrase gets them introduced to Jon, played by Tom Brittney, best known as the vicar in Grantchester.
Jon is a guide, and he'll take them up a route that's officially closed, for $5,000. Jax is ready to walk away at that price. Luce pays it. Jon clips them into harnesses, leads them out onto the planks and hands each of them an oxygen tank for the altitude.
What Jon really is
A drug smuggler. Jon uses the tourists he guides as unwitting mules, sending fentanyl across the border inside the gear he gives them. Every piece of help he offers turns out to be part of the job:
- The fee — the women pay him $5,000 to become his carriers without knowing it.
- The oxygen tanks — they're full of fentanyl, not oxygen.
- The return — after a rockslide strands the women high on the mountain, Jon survives, gets back in touch by radio and comes for them. He's coming for the tanks.
- The rescue — the helicopter he promises belongs to the people he works for.
Jon never lies to them about how dangerous the mountain is. He lies about what they're carrying up it.
The second twist
Luce isn't Luce either. Her real name is Billie. She never knew Shiloh; she was a fan of Shiloh's climbing videos, which she started watching after a cancer diagnosis. She has stopped treatment and hasn't told her mother. When she saw that Jax was selling Shiloh's truck, she borrowed the name of one of Shiloh's real friends from social media to get close to her.
"Each of our characters are kind of going through something emotionally that drives them," Slater told Nerdist.
Billie is the one who finds the drugs. She throws a tank off the mountain, and Jon pushes her to her death.
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How it ends
The last fight is on a bridge. Jax stays clipped in, holds a tank over the edge and makes Jon come for it. When the bridge gives way, Jon falls and Jax doesn't. The helicopter that takes her off the mountain belongs to Jon's employers, and the remaining tank is the price of the ride.
Back at the bar where it started, Jax drinks to Shiloh and Billie, and sends Billie's mother the message Billie never did. The film's last scene goes to Becky, the survivor of the first film, played again by Grace Caroline Currey. The Hunter family invites her to a memorial climb for Shiloh, at a place called Hell's Chasm.
A third film is already in development, with Scott Mann writing and directing.
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