Director: Tarsem Singh
Year: 2006 | USA/India
Runtime: 119 minutes.

Watching The Fall is like being trapped inside the world’s most expensive bedtime story, told by someone who is actively trying to emotionally sabotage you. It looks like a perfume commercial, but the plot is powered by spite, morphine, and a man with a broken leg and unresolved issues.

Tarsem Singh builds a fairy tale out of deserts, palaces, and a little girl’s imagination, which is beautiful, except that the fairy tale is being weaponised. This is a story about heroes and villains and impossible landscapes, and also about a man quietly trying to convince a child that dying would be very reasonable, actually. Most movies use fantasy to escape reality. The Fall uses fantasy to make reality worse, but in really good lighting.

The plot technically exists. A stuntman can’t walk. A girl can’t stop listening. He invents an epic saga full of masked bandits and princesses, mostly so he can emotionally outsource his despair. The adventure unfolds across half the planet, yet somehow never leaves the hospital. The villains ride horses. The heroes suffer tragically. The narrator keeps sneaking in little personal grudges.

Visually, the film refuses to be normal. Every frame looks like it took six passports and a spiritual journey to get there. Red fabric flaps heroically in the wind. Blue cities glare at the sky. Costumes arrive already mythological. It’s so pretty you almost don’t notice you’re being emotionally mugged.

This is comedy by aesthetic overload. No punchlines. No relief. Just the noble effort of telling a child a story while slowly poisoning it with adult despair. It’s a movie about imagination, storytelling, and the ethical problem of using a fairy tale as a suicide note.

If you like your fantasy gorgeous, your emotions manipulated, and your movies unsure whether they want to heal you or ruin you, this is your drink. It’s stunning, it’s cruel, and it’s the only film that makes global travel look like a side effect of depression.