
Tarsem Singh’s ‘The Fall’: The almost-lost cult classic
Now streaming on MUBI and showing in theaters across the United States, the film can be seen for the first time since 2008
Lee Pace as Roy Walker in "The Fall."
Still frame from "The Fall"
Words by Andy Crump
An easy trick for making odds and ends of Tarsem Singh’s The Fall is to pay attention to the 12- and 24-minute marks. In the former, Walter Purdy (Sean Gilder), a chronically whiny patient perpetually ensconced in a bathrobe, plops down on his bed, complaining of “tightness” that he compares to “an elephant sitting on my chest.” Ten minutes later, in a different scene, in a totally different setting, behold: A majestic herd of elephants, wading in the shallows of a golden sand beach, rescuing a party of adventurers stranded on a small reef by ferrying them ashore.
The incorporation of pachyderms into The Fall is fundamental to its themes. Singh structures his surrealist fantasy around a story-within-a-story. In the framing story, Roy (Lee Pace), a melancholic stuntman with a busted leg, improvises a swashbuckling revenge tale, represented in the film’s embedded story, to Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a precocious girl with a busted arm; he also dupes her into helping him commit suicide at the same time, though Alexandria’s none the wiser to the chicanery. She’s just a child of about 6, and the middle-aged Roy is a charming, gifted narrator, who casts his extemporized epic with a dazzling company of heroes: A nameless Indian warrior (Jeetu Verma), the slave Ota Benga (Marcus Wesley), the Italian explosives expert Luigi (Robin Smith), the English naturalist Charles Darwin (Leo Bill), and the mysterious Blue Bandit (Emil Hoștină).
At a glance, it seems an innocuous choice to deploy elephants as majestic lumbering saviors for Roy’s marooned protagonists. But no offhand metaphor or casual remark is insignificant for Roy. He absorbs all around him as inspiration. So, when Purdy loudly kvetches about that elephant hunkering down on his chest, Roy must think: “Elephants, you say? What a neat idea.” And so his merry band’s saviors arrive, paddling back and forth through turquoise waves with the heroes on their backs, ready to embark on their quest: To track down and execute their common foe, Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone), a wicked blackguard who has grievously wronged each of them.
Trivial as Purdy’s griping sounds, the connection Roy makes to the yarn he’s spinning for Alexandria reflects The Fall’s driving motif, that the stories people tell are innate to who they are and to how they live. As Roy’s fable burgeons over the ocean and stretches across barren deserts, through lush oases, and to the gates of the Blue City, Governor Odious’ stronghold, he plucks references from the atmosphere around him and folds them into the telling.
Some of these references are larger than others. Roy’s dual case of lovesickness and heartache, from which he’s suffered since the woman of his affections left him for the actor he stood in for when he performed his fateful stunt, is the basis of The Fall’s embedded narrative, as well as his suicidal ideations. But smaller details emerge in the movie, too—the elephants, of course, and also Alexandria’s diastema, a characteristic he gives to the Blue Bandit. In addition to the Bandit, Hoștină plays Alexandria’s late father, so the relationship Roy means to strike here is self-explanatory. But that choice cedes partial authorship of the tale to Alexandria, who integrates people she sees around The Fall’s chief location, a Los Angeles hospital, as proxies for Roy’s characters: Wesley plays the ice delivery man; Bill plays an orderly; Smith plays Roy’s friend and fellow actor; Verma plays a laborer in the orange groves next to the facility. (Roy describes the Indian as a Native American, not as a man from India; his depiction is through Alexandria’s misapprehension.)
Eventually, Alexandria substitutes Roy for her father in her imagination, and casts herself as the Bandit’s daughter, a choice with an awesome emotional impact given her own father’s recent passing and Roy’s stubborn attempt at bringing about his own. He fails. In a state of despair, Roy begins killing off his heroes one by one in the narrative’s tragic climax. When Alexandria tearfully objects, Roy tells her, “It’s my story.” She sniffles back, “Mine too.” Roy relents, and gives the story the happy ending Alexandria hopes for: With his daughter at his side, the Bandit finally defeats Governor Odious.
If you’ve never seen The Fall, watching the film for the first time, in Singh’s stunning 4K re-release, will likely overwhelm you. If you were there for its theatrical run in 2008, the restoration will likely leave you feeling like you’re watching it for the first time all over again, for two reasons. One, minutiae like the transition from figurative elephants to literal ones quite possibly escaped even some of the film’s most committed devotees on their first viewing; two, it’s been almost 20 years since anyone has been able to see the film, earning a reputation as a “lost” cult movie that turns out not to have been “lost” at all. Rather, it just couldn’t find a home after leaving theaters in 2008.
“Nobody would buy the movie,” Singh tells JoySauce, referring to the late 2000s and his efforts at getting The Fall in front of an audience. “Nobody wanted it, even for free.” Why that was the case is a bit of a mystery, though Singh theorizes that his film has been the victim of a culture driven by Rotten Tomatoes. “That’s a horrible system,” he opines. “If you had to give marks to every film, if a film is six by most and doesn't offend people, it'll be 100 percent on the TomatoMeter because everybody's recommending it, and you'll think the greatest movie ever made is The Shawshank Redemption.”
Fair enough. The Fall did meet a divisive response following its initial release; broadly, folks either loved it or hated it, with few opting for any kind of middle ground. But films with predominantly negative reviews have VOD options or spots on one of many streaming services. Logically, it stands that The Fall should, too. Not so; the film was unavailable on streaming platforms until last month, when global streamer MUBI premiered it on its service. No realistic options for watching it exist on physical media, either, outside of secondhand Blu-ray copies that fetch prices of $100 and more on eBay. Undoubtedly, this lack of access earned the film its designation as “lost,” though the label is somewhat erroneous; The Fall is not “lost” in terms of having gone missing, but in terms of going almost completely unseen after 2008. The absence of commercial availability deprived new audiences of opportunities to discover the film for themselves.

"The Fall" is currently streaming on MUBI and playing in select theaters across the United States.
Still frame from "The Fall"
This explains Singh’s sentiment on the re-release. “I just want more eyeballs on the film,” he tells JoySauce. “Ideally, I'd like everybody to only ever see it on a big screen and then keep coming back every day, and if that’s not possible, I’d say take the best possible available thing.” However one feels about The Fall, the film demands to be projected onto 4,300 square feet of white vinyl, where Singh’s palette and compositions express the proper breadth of director of photography Colin Watkinson’s work in the embedded narrative, while the framing narrative’s softer, grounded approach builds up a spiritual intimacy between its characters. They occupy more space. In Roy’s story, they take up less, a surprise given that they are all, even Charles Darwin, larger than life. In a theater, The Fall’s power as a visual masterwork becomes unimpeachable.
Singh’s experiences with the re-release have been, in a word, strange. Countries like France and the United States declined the film toward the end of the aughts; in 2024, audiences in those same countries clap through the film’s end credits. Last year, at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Singh found himself peppered by the same question: “‘What’s with The Fall?” “I realized that maybe we’d reached critical mass,” he says. He determined that when he finished with TIFF ‘23, where he screened his most recent film, Dear Jassi, he would throw himself into The Fall’s 4K restoration, and, ideally, redistribution. (Like The Fall, Dear Jassi is currently in distribution limbo. Maybe it’ll find its following in 2044.)
It’s possible The Fall will, once again, butt against mixed reactions at the event screenings MUBI started hosting around the United States on Oct. 15. Granted, that it’s modern critics and cinephiles who have given the film a much-deserved reevaluation over the years, and as such, it’s also possible the viewers who’ve waited with bated breath for it in the gap between 2008 and today will fall head over heels with it. That 63 percent Rotten Tomatoes score might start ticking up. But Singh wouldn’t mind a second polarized reception. “That's a good thing,” he says. “I never had a problem with that. I want people to love it or hate it. I don't want them to think it's okay. You will get hired again and again, if there's a few people that think it's the best thing to slice bread. If a lot of them think it's a piece of sh*t, that's still okay! But you can't have ‘okay.’"
If there is one word that absolutely does not apply to The Fall, it is “okay.” The film is timeless, like an insect trapped in amber. It’ll look the same another 20 years from now, as it did 20 years ago, never contemporary, but never antiquated, either. This is a truth Singh has come to terms with himself, in large part because of what making The Fall meant to him—what he calls his “grownup child.” He had to make it. There’s no better evidence of this impulse than his choice to self-fund the production, because if he didn’t, there’s a chance no one else would have, and making The Fall was urgent to him. “I made it because I couldn't breathe without making it,” he explains. Talk about having an elephant on your chest.
Published on October 16, 2024
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.