The Falling - review

The Falling is a new film set in an English girls’ school in the 1960s. Directed by Carol Morley, the story is dreamlike, ethereal and at times engrossing. Ultimately, its loss of connection with reality becomes its undoing.

The film concerns an epidemic of fainting among the girls that appears to have no medical foundation. Highly reminiscent of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, the story also borrows that film’s otherworldly atmosphere.

Lydia (Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams) and Abigail (newcomer Florence Pugh) are best friends and the most influential girls within their peer group. Their sexual awakening threatens their pastoral innocence and the unexplained collective fainting or ‘falling’ becomes a metaphor for the disintegration of their childhood.

I particularly like stories set within school and college campuses. Books such as The Secret History and films such as Damsels in Distress are successful because their plots remain tethered to real experiences that the audience can relate to and remember from their own lives. In this way schools and college campuses are ideal settings in which to place a story. This is true also of The Falling, up to a point. When the film becomes more interested in projecting its sense of metaphor rather than remaining true to real life, the audience ceases to be connected to the characters or to care about their fate. That is this film’s undoing. There is no resolution as to why the epidemic of fainting occurs. The characters begin to continually make choices which beggar belief and we lose touch with any real world connection.

The film features an excellent original soundtrack by Tracey Thorn (Everything But the Girl).

Three stars.