Critics reviews

A grim caricature of fascism that recalls the austere music videos that Glazer made for Radiohead... “The Fall” is simple enough to feel like a gag, but haunting enough to land like a warning... “The Fall” vividly traces the thoughtless violence that hides behind the faces we see in waking life.

There’s hope here, though, albeit a fragile one. Glazer doesn’t just show us the fall, but the climb: the slow, spider-like, perilous route from the silent dark to that tiny speck of light that represents freedom. We don’t know if the masked man will make it out alive. Perhaps the real fall is yet to come.

The Fall is an artistic vignette about the current political moment, an intervention intended to spark discussion and highlight the audience’s fears – and, perhaps, hopes – for the future.

The Fall may be a taste of a longer feature to come, or perhaps it is intended as a standalone piece: a haiku of horror in which the centrepiece is that grisly selfie – the snapshot is starkly presented – like the horrendous photos taken of grinning whites around deep south lynchings in the Jim Crow era, given a new banality-of-evil effect in the age of Instagram.