Story: Following the death of YouTuber Shiloh (Virginia Gardner), in the previous film, her sister Jax (Harriet Slater) sets out on a dangerous expedition to Mount Kwan in Thailand to fulfil her late sibling’s bucket-list dreams. Accompanied by devoted fan Luce (Arsema Thomas), the journey soon spirals into a fight for survival when things go horribly wrong.Review: Written as a direct sequel to the 2022 original but built around an entirely new storyline and adventure, Fall 2: Deadpoint knows exactly what audiences are signing up for. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it attempt to add layers of complexity to a concept that thrives on simplicity. Instead, it doubles down on the franchise’s biggest strength: placing ordinary people in extraordinary, life-threatening situations and letting the tension do the heavy lifting.The story follows Jax (Harriet Slater), still haunted by the loss of her thrill-seeking sister Shiloh, as she heads to Thailand’s treacherous Mount Kwan to complete one of Shiloh’s unfinished adventures. Joining her is Luce (Arsema Thomas), one of Shiloh’s most devoted followers. Predictably, what begins as a tribute quickly turns into a nightmare, and before long the duo find themselves trapped in yet another seemingly impossible survival scenario.Directed by Peter and Michael Spierig, the film is an edge-of-the-seat survival thriller that rarely lets up once the danger kicks in. Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank’s screenplay follows a blueprint that will feel very familiar to fans of the original. The reason for embarking on such a reckless adventure remains as flimsy and convenient as ever, but much like the first film, it somehow manages to work within the heightened reality this franchise has created.The second half is where the film truly comes alive. The suspense sequences are effectively staged, generating genuine anxiety as the characters find themselves hanging, climbing and scrambling through increasingly impossible situations. The tension-filled set pieces do much of the heavy lifting, compensating for a narrative that doesn’t always convince when it comes to the characters’ motivations. After all, risking one’s life to honour someone who lost theirs doing something equally dangerous is a premise that demands a fair amount of suspension of disbelief.Yet the film benefits from the fact that social media-fuelled thrill-seeking is hardly uncommon today. In a world filled with influencers chasing the next adrenaline rush, the Fall franchise doesn’t feel nearly as far-fetched as it might have a decade ago.The film’s real star, however, is Andrew Starhorn’s cinematography. His camera work captures both the beauty and terror of extreme heights with remarkable effectiveness. The vertigo-inducing visuals and gravity-defying shots create a constant sense of unease, making viewers feel every slip, every fall and every desperate attempt at survival.Harriet Slater delivers a decent performance as Jax, while Arsema Thomas brings warmth and sincerity to Luce. The supporting cast does what’s required of them, although the film doesn’t offer much room for nuanced character development or standout dramatic moments. The screenplay is designed almost entirely around the adventure premise, and the performances serve that purpose efficiently.Fall 2: Deadpoint doesn’t try to push the envelope or rewrite the rules of the franchise. It simply follows the pattern that has already proven successful. And considering the thrills still land and the suspense remains largely effective, means it’s working all over again. Sometimes, when a formula works, the smartest thing a sequel can do is hold on tight and enjoy the ride.

At some point in the last 10 to 15 years, the phrase “representation matters” crossed over, at least for me, from a key directive to a tired cliché. I’d grown frustrated by the way some took it to mean that merely putting a (LGBTQ/POC/poor/disabled/what have you) person onscreen was the end goal rather than a first step; the accompanying pressure for those marginalized communities to “feel seen” by these depictions; the implication that making people “feel seen” should be art’s loftiest ambition in the first place.

But I never disagreed with the sentiment itself, only the oversimplification of it. A new documentary about Under the Skin and A Different Man star Adam Pearson, who has facial disfigurement from neurofibromatosis, serves as a refreshingly thoughtful and touchingly intimate reminder of its truth — at least, when Zero Intention of Living Quietly isn’t tripping over its own eagerness to remind you how thoughtful and intimate and true it is.

Directed by Edward Lovelace, the film serves as a loose memoir for Pearson. Footage of his present life is interspersed with old photos and home movies and film and television clips to chronicle his experience with neurofibromatosis and his intermittent career as a performer — from talent shows in his youth (including, delightfully, one performance in which he’s dressed as Avril Lavigne), to his breakout role at 26 in 2013’s Under the Skin and subsequent reality TV appearances, to his even bigger second breakout in 2024’s A Different Man.

Throughout, the idea of representation — what it can look like, what it can mean — serves as an overarching theme. From the dark of an empty movie theater, or over clips of favorite movies, Pearson speaks of seeing his own wants or challenges reflected in characters like Buzz Lightyear or Forrest Gump or Elle Woods. He also reflects on the way others have projected their own ideas about him through stories like The Elephant Man, and not necessarily for the better: “That goddamn film came out and my gosh, did the world let me know about it,” he grouses before recalling a particularly horrific incident of adolescent bullying.

But the concept comes through most meaningfully in the relationship at the film’s heart, between Pearson and Ellie, a teenager living with the same rare genetic condition and who shares a similar hope of becoming a performer. Pearson’s been recruited by Ellie’s mother to serve as a sort of big brother who might be able to help her understand what she’s going through — something, he notes, he wishes he’d had himself growing up.

Unexpectedly to Pearson, the relationship turns out to go both ways. His desire to set a positive example for Ellie inspires him to let go of his own fears and pursue anew his own goal of becoming a performer, which he’d gradually set aside in the wake of a painful nightclub assault and growing worry about being treated as an object of fascination or revulsion or pity in his public appearances. Otherwise, he reasons, he’d be “a hypocrite” for telling Ellie the condition doesn’t have to thwart her dreams when he’s let it thwart his.

His ongoing interest in the mainstream visibility of disabled and disfigured people takes on a more personal dimension as he considers what it would mean for Ellie — not only some nebulous idea of “people with disabilities,” but this specific dear friend — to see faces like his onscreen, and especially to see them as not being defined solely by their difference. His refired ambition most prominently manifests in his decision to star in A Different Man, after initially declining to even read the script.

It’s a moving arc, and a deeply relatable one — I suspect just about anyone who’s ever had a kid look up to them understands that urge to become the hero they think you are. Which is why it’s frustrating that Zero Intention of Living Quietly works too hard to sell it.

Pearson’s initial reluctance to do A Different Man, for example, is illustrated in dramatic close-ups of him deleting emails about it from his inbox, while a later scene expresses his anxiety during the film’s Berlin press conference by having the sound fade out as if he’s a shell-shocked soldier in a war movie. Such moments feel not only wholly unnecessary (we all know what “not responding to an email” looks like) but clumsily staged, in a way that inspires one to wonder how much else of this story has been amplified or obscured or otherwise tidied up for the sake of a prettier narrative.

Then there’s the score by Stephen Rennicks and Hugh Drumm. Its wistful, tinkly piano seems designed to remind us how very serious and important the story we’re watching unfold is, to impose a sense of poignancy by sheer force of will. Instead, it has the effect of distancing us from what’s actually happening onscreen, reminding us that we ought to be feeling big feelings instead of letting us sit in them.

Zero Intention thankfully resists the temptation to make Pearson into some angelic hero, allowing him to speak candidly about his fears around the progression of his condition, or the loneliness and anger he’s struggled with, or how he used to verbally bully others in turn (“If my disability is fair game, anything is fair game,” he recounts of his reasoning). At the same time, it seems reluctant to dig into any of those thornier topics too deeply, lest its arc stray too far from the rousing but frankly generic conclusion that Pearson is now “done with fear.”

It needn’t have sweated so much. Zero Intention’s biggest selling points are simply Pearson and Ellie themselves, both of whom come across as utterly likable without trying too hard to be so. In their bond — in the fierce affection Ellie has for one of the few people in her life who can understand exactly what she’s going through, in the seriousness with which Pearson takes the responsibility to make a better world for her — the film becomes an affecting reminder that “representation matters” became a cliché because of how plainly, enduringly true it is.

Fifteen minutes into Yellow Eyes I started keeping a list.

A young married couple inherits a decaying house from an uncle they apparently barely knew. Somewhere in that house is a door with an eyeball painted over it. The husband begins dismissing his wife’s concerns almost the moment she has any. Something old is in the walls and it would like a body.

None of that is a slow build. That is a movie moving through a checklist at a jog, and it gets through most of the list before the first act is over. By the time Jesse Korman’s debut arrives at the idea it actually wants to explore, it has already spent the goodwill that comes from not knowing where a horror movie is headed.

The couple is the good part

Here is the frustrating thing. The performances are good.

Michael Kunicki and Nena Martins are good together. As Brad and Julia they have real chemistry and enough specificity in their line readings to suggest two people with a history rather than a pair of horror-movie positions labeled Husband and Wife. There are stretches early on where you can feel a different film pressing against this one, the kind where a marriage is the actual subject and the demon is only what forces the conversation.

That version keeps almost happening. Then something rattles and the movie remembers its obligations.

Possession by numbers

Once the idol starts working on Brad, Yellow Eyes commits to the shape audiences already know. He changes. She notices. He denies it. The eyes go yellow, black oil turns up, and the distance between them widens on schedule.

The individual beats are executed competently, and at this scale that is not nothing. The problem is that competence is all they are. A possession story lives on the specific texture of what the entity wants and how it gets there, and Mickey Solis’s screenplay keeps reaching for the general version. An ancient force that feeds on humanity’s darkest desires is a premise with a lot of room in it. The movie treats it as a reason for a man to become frightening rather than a reason to find out what this particular man wanted before anything got hold of him.

The eyeball door is a good image. So is an idol sealed inside a wall by a relative nobody in the family understood. Both are set up early and both mostly function as signposts.

The production story

According to Big Picture Media, Jesse Korman shot the film in 12 days on an approximately $150,000 budget. This is his feature directorial debut, produced by Joe Swanberg and Ben Gojer. Korman is also the vocalist for The Number Twelve Looks Like You, which is worth knowing when you are considering where a person learns to build and release tension.

On a craft level the money is on screen. The house reads as a real location with real decay. The performances are directed rather than merely captured. Nothing about Yellow Eyes looks like a filmmaker in over his head, which is the more common outcome for a first feature at this scale.

But a schedule is not an argument. A 12-day shoot explains why some things are simple. It does not explain why the story goes exactly where you expect it to go. Structure is the cheapest thing in a movie to make surprising and the one thing that costs nothing but nerve.

Verdict

Yellow Eyes, which began streaming on Screambox on August 18, is an accomplished low-budget debut with a cast capable of selling its supernatural melodrama. Its eagerness to embrace familiar possession-movie conventions is what keeps it from developing an identity of its own.

I would watch whatever Jesse Korman does next. I would just like him to make me wait a little longer before I know how it ends.