Peter Spierig

A plank walk on a Thai mountain needs little help to become frightening. In Fall 2: Deadpoint (2026), Peter and Michael Spierig keep giving it help, adding problems before the previous danger has become unbearable. We flinched at the climbing, then grew impatient when familiar personal conflicts interrupted it. There is a worthwhile thriller here for devotees of heights and difficult footing, but the brothers keep distracting us from it.

Peter’s films are largely collaborations with his brother Michael, who also shares writing duties on several of them. The early work moved from the zombies of Undead (2003) to the vampire science fiction of Daybreakers (2009), starring Ethan Hawke. In Predestination (2014), time travel supplies the puzzle. The later move into the Saw series with Jigsaw (2017), followed by the haunted-house horror of Winchester (2018), took them into more familiar genre settings.

Their preference for practical effects and in-camera techniques helps explain why physical danger seems a natural subject for them. It is a sound starting point for horror and suspense: we need to believe the obstacle is there before worrying about getting past it. But effects cannot decide how long a scene should last. In the mountain thriller, the brothers too often move on to the next difficulty before the first has become unbearable.

The basic survival-thriller craft is sound: the Spierigs put frightening obstacles in the women’s way. The personal conflicts are much less persuasive, too often recalling material from the first film instead of making this predicament harder to endure. Those scenes ask us to keep track of more drama without giving us much more reason to care. Try Fall 2: Deadpoint if climbing peril is your particular pleasure, and allow for the thin dialogue between hazards.