Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is Rory Kennedy's follow-up to her 2022 documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which examined the profit-driven culture blamed for two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. The sequel argues the aviation safety scandal never really ended, revisiting the case through the suspicious death of whistleblower John Barnett in March 2024 and the January 2024 mid-air door-plug blowout, and asking whether Boeing and regulators have genuinely been held to account.

The film features grieving relatives, including Naoise Connolly Ryan, who lost her husband in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, alongside new whistleblowers who came forward after the first documentary and hidden camera footage from a Boeing plant showing workers wary of flying on the planes they build. It also highlights politicians such as Senator Josh Hawley confronting former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun over his $32.8m salary, though Calhoun faces no criminal charges. The two original crashes killed 346 people combined, and the review frames the documentary as bleak and horror-like precisely because its events are real.