The Falling (2015)
Directed by Carol Morley
England, 1969. The fascinating Abbie and the troubled Lydia are great friends. After an unexpected tragedy occurs in the strict girls' school they attend, a mysterious epidemic of fainting breaks out that threatens the mental sanity and beliefs of the tormented people involved, both teachers and students.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced The Falling
What critics say influenced The Falling
As in other cinematic studies of female youth hysteria, such as Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” and particularly Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” the crux of the narrative shifts from the enigmatic occurrence at its center to the slowly devastating impact thereof on surrounding parties.
A disant echo of The Virgin Suicides and Innocence, The Falling also nods to the hyper-real religious allegories of Bruno Dumont and shares its atmosphere with the more fantastic of the early Seventies BBC Play for Today productions.
It is impossible not to think of similarly themed classics, notably Innocence, The Virgin Suicides and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
There are echoes here of The Crucible, of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock - acknowledged influences for Morley – but also of real-life incidences of the phenomenon scientists call ‘mass psychogenic illness’, including one just last year at a school in northern Colombia, where girls fainted for reasons doctors could not explain.
Clear links to such key texts as Ken Russell’s fiercely political The Devils (and perhaps, by extension, Hans Christian-Schmid’s Requiem or Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross ) point us toward psychosomatic interpretations.
There’s something reminiscent too of Joe Wright’s beautiful Atonement adaptation, the heat and precariousness of it.