The Falling

The Falling (15)

UK 2014 100 mins  Dir: Carol Morley  Starring: Greta Scacchi, Maisie Williams, Maxine Peake, Joe Cole, Monica Dolan, Florence Pugh, Morfydd Clark, Rose Caton, Anna Burnett

Picnic at Hanging Rock. There – it has to be said at the outset to acknowledge the obvious comparisons to be drawn between Peter Weir’s haunting masterpiece and Carol Morley’s accomplished, dreamy and beguilingly heady brew of Wordsworth, the esoteric philosophy of Ouspensky, John Michell’s Age of Atlantis and raging female hormones in a repressed and regimented single-sex school. But for the slightly twee Tracey Thorn soundtrack, The Falling could have been made in the seventies. It certainly feels of a piece with the likes of If… and Walkabout (the producer is a certain Luc Roeg, fact fans), not least because of Morley’s penchant for flash frames.

It’s 1969 and at strict rural girls’ school overseen by stern headmistress Miss Alvaro (Dolan), troubled, headstrong sixteen-year-old Lydia Lamont (Williams) forms an intense friendship with rebellious, Wordsworth-loving minx Abbie Mortimer (Pugh). She also has a difficult relationship with her virtually catatonic single mother Eileen (Peake), who refuses to leave the house, and a queasy, semi-incestuous one with her amateur occultist brother Kenneth (Cole). After a tragedy occurs, the girls begin to be stricken by mysterious fits of fainting and uncontrollable twitching. Miss Alvaro and her equally sour, unbending deputy Miss Mantel (Scacchi) are sceptical of what they believe to be nothing more than adolescents conspiring to make an exhibition of themselves. But more sympathetic young art teacher Miss Charron (Clark) soon finds herself afflicted too.

Morley’s bold, confident follow-up to her achingly sad documentary Dreams of a Life is both strange and sensual but never makes the mistake of becoming wilfully opaque. She also avoids fetishising the period setting, with only a Stylophone and background TV reports about man’s first venture into space anchoring her film in the late sixties. Bristol’s Maisie Williams, of Game of Thrones fame, gives a revelatory performance as the complex, increasingly tic-ridden Lydia. The other girls are carefully drawn too, especially sceptical Titch (Caton) and prefect Susan (Burnett), who yearns to become Abbie. As in Picnic, there are also humanising hints of the vulnerability beneath the senior teachers’ forbidding façades. “This generation,” sneers Miss Alvaro to Miss Mantel. “They think they’re so misunderstood. If they had any idea what it’s like to be a middle-aged woman, they’d know what misunderstood meant.” Despite a slight last reel surrender to melodrama, The Falling seems assured of a place on all the most discerning Films of the Year lists.