‘I resent this idea that we’re just emotional…’
Having been a high school teacher for nearly a decade now, I can confirm that teenage girls are absolutely insane. There is more drama in the average life of a teenager than in all the plays of Shakespeare. The Falling takes that hysterical teenage melodrama and spins it out into a singular and thought provoking mystery…
Abbie (Florence Pugh in her film debut) and Lydia (Maisie Williams), best friends and classmates at an English all girls’ school, are inseparable. When tragedy strikes one of the girls, it inspires a spate of extravagant and hysterical fainting that seems to infest all the other girls in the school. Lydia’s emotionally detached mother, Eileen (Maxine Peake), has little sympathy, while the teachers, represented here by Monica Dolan and Greta Scacchi, are downright hostile to the perceived plight of their students.
The Falling perfectly captures that teenage notion that everything is incredibly serious and important. The feeling that the world both revolves around you and is against you at every turn. By casting actual teenagers in Pugh and Williams, both of whom are excellent here, writer-director Carol Morley exemplifies the intensity of emotion that comes with being a teenager, as well as the frenemy dynamic often shared by teenage girls. Pugh, despite only appearing in the first half an hour of the film. is so clearly a star in the making that the film almost terminally suffers in her absence. Luckily, Williams delivers a career best performance, at once vulnerable and maddeningly self-involved, and this carries the film through to the quite beautiful conclusion (aside from the incest, obviously).
Presented almost as a fairy tale, The Falling joins the canon of several other films preoccupied by the potency of teenage emotion. It deserves a wider audience.
