Starring: Maisie Williams, Maxine Peake, Florence Pugh
It’s 1969 and girl’s school students Lydia (Williams) and
Abby (Pugh) share a special bond that grows deeper when Abby reveals that she
thinks she’s pregnant. Suffering fainting spells and nausea, Abby’s condition
is related to something more mysterious that ultimately kills her. Soon
afterwards, Lydia and most of the other girls at the school also begin
displaying the same symptoms, with their cause still a mystery.
Eccentric films are nothing new; films that play with an
audience’s perception, play with editing and play with mood in ways different
to conventional cinema. In fact, nowadays they’re very common if you look in
the right places, but The Falling straddles the line between the art house
sense of experimentation and a more conventional tale driven by the strength of
its actors. In truth, The Falling doesn’t evoke much of a sense of contemporary
cinema, but more some of the more artistically-inclined filmmakers of the era
in which this film is set.
Comparisons in particular have been made to Nicolas Roeg’s
seminal 1974 chiller, Don’t Look Now. The pervading sense of dread, the motif
of water, the strange editing and with at least one scene blatantly reproducing
a similar scene from Don’t Look Now. There’s something rather telling about the
production credit for Luc (son of Nicolas) Roeg. Still there are threads of
other influences, in particular a subtler sense of kinship with Carrie (1976),
in a tale of adolescent female life, fractured relationships between mothers
and daughters, coupled with a sense of foreboding danger and the strangely
otherworldly. Perhaps the incidents of The Fallen have their own justification
in reality but the film’s obtuse refusal to provide easy answers is what makes
it unsettling.
The film does have some solid acting talent behind it, with
Maisie Williams (probably best known as Arya Stark in TV’s Game Of Thrones) in
the lead and Maxine Peake as her agoraphobic mother, and the two have some good
scenes together, particularly Peake whose eyes here look set like burned-out
lightbulbs; a sense of distance and something soullessly adrift, but Williams’
performance has an eerie grandeur about it, partly because her frequent
fainting spells seems to almost present themselves as some strange ritual
dance, most effectively seen when the condition has finally taken hold over most
of the school in easily the film’s most chilling scene, one of the most unsettling
sequences in recent film memory.
As much as the film’s impressively put together, it also has
a great story. On the face of it, it’s a simple, if mysterious, premise but
therein lies a number of different themes touching on not just mental illness
and adolescence but also incest, ephebophilia, sexism and more. It may not
sound cheerful and in truth it isn’t, but it masterfully weaves these ideas
together. Understandably the film also lunges too much towards pretention at
times. The film’s constant attempts at grasping atmosphere cause the film, at
an unremarkable 106 minutes, to still drag a considerable amount, with the film
possibly being worth a tiny 75 minute runtime, and the film’s recurring use of
songs to break up the story organises and compartmentalises the plot, but also becomes
very repetitive as do the recurrent scenes of fainting (I did start to feel
sorry for poor Maisie Williams, who takes a lot of spills to the floor
throughout this film). Those without the patience for the artsier side of
cinema will probably be left frustrated at the film’s refusal to tell its story
efficiently, but if you place more emphasis on mood and atmosphere than on clean
storytelling, it might be worth checking out.
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