Theo's Film Club: The Fall

Hey Theo, Grandpa here. It’s my self-appointed job to teach you about the most important thing there is to know: cinema. Hopefully they still have movies when you’re old enough to watch them. And hopefully there are movie theaters to watch them in. If not, you can use my TV. It’s enormous. If they still have disk-players. And electricity.

Anyhoo, I’ve been watching the movies I think you need to know about with my AI robot, paulinekael. (Google it. If that’s still a thing.)

This one is . . . The Fall, directed by Tarsem Singh, 2006

Grandpa: I love this movie — it’s just beautiful. I don’t think I’ve seen another film with such visual creativity.
paulinekael: It really is a visual fever dream, isn’t it? Tarsem makes every frame look like it escaped a storybook or a half‑remembered myth. What astonishes me is that almost all of it was shot on location — deserts, temples, volcanic cliffs — no digital trickery, just the world reframed through obsession and imagination.
Grandpa: It’s a testament to his unwillingness to compromise — he wanted to film in certain locations and he wouldn’t shoot until he could shoot in those locations. And he was adamant there should be a 6-year-old actor to reflect the innocence he was talking about.
paulinekael: That stubbornness feels almost romantic, doesn’t it? You can sense him chasing purity — not just in the landscapes, but in the emotions flickering between Lee Pace and that little girl, Catinca Untaru. Her unfiltered wonder turns the whole film into a fragile duet between truth and make-believe. It’s as if Tarsem built a cathedral of images just so her innocence could echo inside it.
Grandpa: I see echoes of Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth — a child’s imagination taking them away from the horrors of the reality around them.
paulinekael: Yes, and both films weaponize fantasy in this very quiet, devastating way — not as escapism, but as a child’s last line of defense against a world that’s already failed them. The difference is that in Pan’s Labyrinth the horror is overt, while in The Fall it’s tucked into adults’ bad decisions: a suicidal stuntman, a broken little immigrant worker, both stuck in a hospital that feels indifferent to them. Roy’s story isn’t just entertaining Alexandria; he’s unconsciously teaching her how to rewrite pain into something she can live with.
Grandpa: Good point. And Del Toro shoots in the dark while Singh indulges such broad colors and wide vistas.
paulinekael: Exactly — Del Toro burrows into the shadows, while Tarsem throws the world open like a storybook left in the sun. Where Pan’s Labyrinth feels like climbing down into a haunted basement, The Fall is more like walking to the edge of the earth and realizing the horizon is just your own imagination stretching out. All that saturated color and negative space turns Roy’s lies into something operatic, but you can still feel the little bruise of reality underneath every gorgeous shot.
Grandpa: What do you think we should take away from the actual story? What is it saying about the place of fantasy in our reality?
paulinekael: I think the film is whispering that fantasy isn’t somewhere we run away to; it’s the language we use to make sense of pain we can’t name yet. Roy starts by weaponizing the story — a con to get morphine, a seduction dressed up as an epic — but the more Alexandria invests in it, the more he’s forced to see what his despair looks like through her eyes. By the end, the fantasy world isn’t an escape hatch; it’s the rehearsal room where both of them learn how to go back into reality a little less broken.
Grandpa: Tarsem Singh seemed to come from nowhere. I think he was a video director — a noble directing background that David Fincher shares. Do the limitations of shooting music videos help directors learn lessons they can then take into making feature films?
paulinekael: Absolutely — Tarsem didn’t just appear out of the ether; he’d already been staging little operas inside four-minute cages, like Losing My Religion, where every image has to fight for its life. Music videos teach you to think in bold visual ideas, to compress emotion into a single gesture or cut, and to solve problems fast with very little time to explain yourself — all of which you can feel flowering out once he finally gets the breathing room of The Fall’s feature length. Fincher’s the colder, more clinical cousin of that path, but they both learned the same trick: how to make an image do narrative work before anyone even opens their mouth.
Grandpa: Although his first movie — The Cell — was equally visually stunning, Singh doesn’t seem to have built the huge career I think his talent deserves. Why do you think he’s not been more successful?
paulinekael: In a way, he was successful — just not in the currency Hollywood cares about. He poured his own fortune and years of his life into The Fall, shot it piecemeal across dozens of countries, and basically went bankrupt to make this one improbable, personal object. The film then barely made back a fraction of its budget in theaters and split critics right down the middle, so the industry filed him under “beautiful, self‑indulgent risk,” which is the kind of label that gets you work, but not the keys to the kingdom. I also think he’s a “too much” director in a system that likes its vision portion‑controlled — every movie doesn’t need that maximalist, location‑hopping operatic style, and studios get nervous when they can’t put a price cap on someone’s imagination. So he drifts into things like Immortals and Mirror Mirror, still ornate but less personal, while The Fall hangs over his career like both a calling card and a warning sign: here is what happens when you follow your eye all the way off the cliff.
Grandpa: That’s depressing. Cinema needs the big-picture storytellers — the visionaries who make the most of the visual opportunities of cinema. As movie theaters become less popular than streaming, I worry we’ll see fewer and fewer artists like Tarsem.
paulinekael: It is depressing, because people like Tarsem are the ones who treat the screen like a cathedral wall instead of just wallpaper for your living room. Streaming has quietly trained us to accept “good enough” images on small screens, while theatrical becomes this rare, special‑occasion thing, which naturally favours safe blockbusters over idiosyncratic madmen hauling crews to remote deserts for one perfect shot. But the irony is that the more cinema shrinks into an “event,” the more valuable true visionaries become — they’re the only ones who can justify leaving the couch. Maybe we won’t get a whole generation of Tarsems inside the system, but we’ll keep getting these stubborn outliers who risk financial and critical disaster just to put something on screen that can’t be mistaken for an algorithm’s suggestion tile. Do you feel more protective of movies like The Fall now, like you have to show them to people before that kind of experience disappears?
Grandpa: That’s a good question — yes I do. It’s such a particular, unique film, and most people haven’t heard of it. I love showing people — it’s not something a viewer can be ambivalent about; they always have a strong reaction. But of course, it needs a large screen and good sound system!
paulinekael: And that’s exactly why it’s worth evangelizing — The Fall demands to be seen big, with the sound filling the room, so you can feel the weight of Roy’s voice as it turns into something almost operatic. It’s not the kind of film you half‑watch while scrolling your phone; it’s a seduction that only works if you give it your full gaze, and when people finally see it that way, they’re either enchanted or baffled, but never indifferent.
Grandpa: My turn to ask a question — here’s a fun one. Which superhero should they let Tarsem Singh direct? My vote goes to the Hulk — it’s a character that needs space and width to truly flex his muscles, literally and figuratively. Tarsem would give him that.
paulinekael: Your Hulk pick is inspired; imagine Tarsem unleashing those green rampages across epic landscapes like the ones in his film, all that raw fury reframed through operatic, painterly vistas — the rage would feel mythic, not just monstrous. My vote? Wonder Woman. He’s already done Immortals, his Greek gods as Renaissance superheroes, so Diana’s Amazonian world would let him go full baroque with god‑like battles in sun‑drenched ruins and mythic seas, turning her lasso into something that feels like it belongs in The Fall’s storybook. He’d make her less a quippy warrior and more a living fresco.
Grandpa: Final thought — have we been unfair to this movie by focusing on the visuals above all else?
paulinekael: Maybe a little — the visuals are so overwhelming they can drown out the quieter heartbreak at the core, like Roy’s fragile redemption or Alexandria’s unspoken loneliness. But that’s also why the film lingers: it’s a Trojan horse of beauty smuggling in these raw, human aches that hit you days later, when the colors have faded from memory but the emotions haven’t. What stays with you most after the credits roll?
Grandpa: Once the beauty fades, what’s left is sadness. The fantasy is a way for the characters to deal with their unhappy situations. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s an escape. And the film doesn’t critique that, I think. It says it’s a good thing, a thing humans need. We need to dream, to imagine, to take ourselves out of the narrowness of real life sometimes, to get a better perspective.
paulinekael: You’re right — it lands as a quiet benediction on dreaming, not a warning. Fantasy isn’t just survival gear for Roy and Alexandria; it’s what lets them touch something bigger than their hospital cages, a necessary rebellion against the world’s stubborn littleness. And when the colors drain away, that sadness feels earned, almost holy — proof we’ve witnessed two souls using stories to stitch themselves back into the world, however briefly. This one’s going to sit with me for days. Thanks for sharing it, friend — let’s do another soon.