The Falling

Every appendage on our body was crossed, and then wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, the crossed appendages were crossed with one anoth­er, then we hung black cats above the door and tossed horse­shoes under lad­ders, all in the hope that direc­tor Car­ol Morley’s fol­low-up to her med­i­ta­tive doc hit Dreams of a Life would be a thing of shim­mer­ing greatness.

Alas, this time it wasn’t to be, as the direc­tor has deliv­ered a very wool­ly, pre­cious and non­sen­si­cal dra­ma which flits and flails to its own off-tem­po beat with­out a care in the world. In fact, a feel­ing of loose­ness, of casu­al nat­u­ral­ism is strained to the point where it looks as if the film is about to burst a blood ves­sel. It’s hard to talk about, not because it’s scat­tered with spoil­er land­mines or devi­ous twists, more that not much hap­pens for a painful­ly long stretch of time.

Per­haps in a point­ed manœu­vre to bypass con­ven­tion, Mor­ley remains illu­sive as to who the film is actu­al­ly about. Our best guess is Masie Williams’ Lydia, a spiky yet needy pupil at a semi-rur­al girls’ school whose sto­ry plays out some time dur­ing the 1960s. Her moth­er (Max­ine Peake) appears as a cabaret pas­tiche of a fraz­zled des­ti­tute house­wife with a dent­ed bee­hive hair­do and omnipresent fag to empha­sise back­ground nerviness.

She refus­es to leave the house, suf­fer­ing qui­et­ly and clear­ly await­ing some kind of pow­der-keg show­down with her gob­by daugh­ter. Lucky for Lydia she has Abbie (Flo­rence Pugh) to hang around with, a walk­ing moral pan­ic who’s gained an appetite for sex, get­ting it when­ev­er and wher­ev­er she can, even from Lydia’s up-for-it old­er broth­er, Ken­neth (Joe Cole). And then, peo­ple start fainting.

For much of the film, we are sold a suc­ces­sion of rea­sons as to why this ​“out­break” is nev­er giv­en due atten­tion by the fac­ul­ty, by par­ents and by the stu­dents them­selves. Like some­thing out of an ill-con­ceived ​’80s John Hugh­es high-school com­e­dy, Mon­i­ca Dolan’s chainsmok­ing head teacher Miss Alvaro remains know­ing­ly unsym­pa­thet­ic towards the plight of her young charges, pos­si­bly high­light­ing a laboured point about a gen­er­a­tional chasm between care­free teen­dom and the com­ic frigid­i­ty of mid­dle age.

Rela­tion­ships are pro­posed and then dis­card­ed, mem­bers of the sup­port­ing cast dan­gled in front of the cam­era as some­how vital to the events we’re see­ing, only for them to be swift­ly side­lined and the focus trained elsewhere.

The prob­lem is that you feel that the per­form­ers aren’t quite sure of the film in which they’re star­ring, that they’re not com­plic­it with Morley’s lofti­er, more exper­i­men­tal vision. The Falling mis­takes obfus­ca­tion for mys­tery and coiled out­rage for dread, so that when the next ran­dom thing hap­pens, it comes across as The Next Ran­dom Thing, and not an impact­ful, log­i­cal (with­in its own world) pro­gres­sion of all that’s come before. In all, an infu­ri­at­ing, wispy dis­ap­point­ment from one of Britain’s brightest.