One Fall

Mr. Fuller is working on some kind of redemption theme, but he sabotages the story with underdeveloped plot threads: a bartender with cancer, an old car crash, sibling rivalry. Everything is annoyingly oblique; why?

The cast is engaging, and there are a few light-chuckle moments, but the script needed another rewrite, and the film itself needed to be guided by a thornier sensibility than Fuller's.

Despite its grander ambitions, the film ultimately feels minor and superficial.

Writer, director and star Fuller posits a dichotomy between belief and scientific rationality, only to gull us into accepting the former.

Clunky allegorical elements, however, remain unsatisfyingly ambiguous throughout the picture.

One Fall is a bafflingly lame assemblage of self-help platitudes, the sort of film in which every narrative detail is specifically placed to pave the way for a pat moral you've grasped before the opening credits have barely concluded.