Let Me Fall (TIFF film) trailer

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Drawing on true stories and interviews with the families of addicts, this harrowing portrait of addiction follows Stella and Magnea through the decades as precarious teenage years morph into perilous adulthoods.

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TIFF 2018 Review: Let Me Fall

Inspired by the true life recollections of addicts and their families, Icelandic filmmaker Baldvin Z’s harrowing and overwhelmingly emotional drama Let Me Fall eschews cheap clichés surrounding drug dependency in favour of a more delicately crafted, time shifting character study.

As teenagers, Stella (Eyrún Björk Jakobsdóttir) and Magnea (Elín Sif Halldórsdóttir) were inseparable best friends, with the more outgoing and adventurous Stella turning Magnea on to the joys of recreational injection drug use. Stella’s life would continue to grow more chaotic, and Magnea’s loyalty to her closest companion pushes her deeper into addiction and codependency, ruining the young woman’s relationship to her concerned parents. As adults, Stella (Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir) has done her best to stay clean and sober, while Magnea (Kristín þóra Haraldsdóttir) has become a physical and emotional wreck, turning low level sexual tricks in hope of landing her next fix.

Bouncing back and forth between the past and present and building towards moments that would change these characters’ lives forever, Let Me Fall painfully and poignantly casts addiction issues in a refreshingly unpolished light. While Baldvin Z (Life in a Fishbowl) never shies away from the harsh and traumatizing nature of addiction and the fraught perils of growing up, he’s also careful to never emphasise style over substance and realistic emotional meaning. It’s as quietly forceful and sorrowful as addiction narratives tend to get, and the four leads prove to be up to the daunting task, especially Halldórsdóttir and Haraldsdóttir, who undergo tremendous transformations to embody the film’s most tragic character. Anyone looking to make a film about addictive personalities would do well to learn from this one.
 

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Just saw it. It's really good, especially the acting.
 

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"Let Me Fall" — Harrowing stories of drug use have been part of cinema for ages, but Icelandic director Baldvin Z takes a startlingly tragic approach to examining the ways addiction tears apart friendships and families. The story follows two teenage friends who slip deeper into a world of hard drugs despite the best intentions of the people around them. Two pairs of actresses seamlessly portray the women at different points in their lives as what began as a careless habit turns into a struggle of recovery. Based loosely on interviews with the families of addicts, "Let Me Fall" doesn't blink in showing how drugs can destroy lives, and its heartbreaking moments come when it shows how powerless the people around an addict can feel.

Five movies you might've missed: Smaller standout Toronto film festival picks | The Guardian
 

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Busan Film Review: ‘Let Me Fall’

Let Me Fall” is a harrowing look at addiction that stands out amid an autumn filled with films about junkies and their families. Again touching a domestic nerve as he did with “Life in a Fishbowl,” Icelandic auteur Baldvin Z’s drama tells the story of two teenage girls and their descent into the hellish depths of substance abuse. Like Z’s two previous features, it is strongly acted and sensitively directed. It is also remarkable for its unflinching gaze at the abuses the protagonists suffer to satisfy their habits, and for its compelling cinematic style. “Fall” opened in Reykjavik on Sept. 7, far out-grossing “The Nun” in its first week, and is still going strong.

Like Amazon’s awards-buzz title “Beautiful Boy,” “Let Me Fall” is also based on true stories and considerable research in the addict community. And like “Beautiful Boy,” it unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, cutting between the girls as thrill-hungry teenagers and their lives some 12 years later, when they are both broken adults. But in “Fall,” parents and extended family play a lesser role, although Magnea’s father (Thorsteinn Bachmann) is a sympathetic if ineffectual figure. The focal point is the relationship between the girls and how a betrayal and its repercussions change both their lives.

From the high-octane opening minutes in which 15-year-old Magnea (the mesmerizing Elín Sif Halldórsdóttir, from Z’s TV series “Court 3”), her faster-living friend Stella (Eyrún Björk Jakobsdóttir) and Stella’s drug-dealing boyfriend Toni (Sigurbjartus Sturla Atlason) rob a man they have conned in an internet sex scam, the film grabs viewers and doesn’t let up for the next two hours. Obviously, it’s a scam that the two others have worked before, but for Magnea, it’s just the beginning. This pleasingly zaftig, innocent-looking, middle-class girl is bored with school and her longtime friends. She’s physically attracted to Stella and willing to try anything the older girl suggests.

Z and his co-screenwriter Birgir Örn Steinarsson aren’t particularly concerned with providing psychological explanations for Magnea’s behavior. We see that her parents are divorced and both her mother and father have new partners and younger children in their homes, but Magnea doesn’t seem unhappy moving from one place to the other. It makes it easier to do what she pleases. And what pleases Magnea most is to skip school and hang out with Stella.

With Stella, Magnea partakes of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana and very soon, injectables. She loves the rush, but very quickly gets in over her head. In order to obtain money to pay for their habit, Magnea lets Stella post nude photos of her on a website to lure older, monied men with the promise of sex. Stella’s willingness to pimp out her friend in what they consider an easy game foreshadows a later, more serious act of disloyalty.





As a battered adult, Magnea is played by Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir (virtually unrecognizable from her role in the Sundance award-winner “And Breathe Normally”), struggling to turn tricks to earn enough for her next fix. In contrast, Stella (Kristín Thóra Haraldsdóttir) has been clean for a number of years and is working as a counselor in a women’s center. When the two finally meet again, their ultimate confrontation triggers a downbeat ending.

With his enthralling widescreen lensing, Johann Mani Johannsson (“Life in a Fishbowl”) brings a grungy lyricism to the early scenes of the film, finding visual matches for the characters’ exhilarating highs without in any way romanticizing them. And over the course of the film, his extreme closeups chart the devastation wrought on the once-healthy faces of the protagonists. Composer Olafur Arnalds (another “Fishbowl” collaborator) contributes an apt score, while Ulfur Teitur Traustason’s intelligent cutting builds up to a powerful showdown
 
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