- Title: The Falling
- IMDb: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us back to 2014’s The Falling which is an odd thriller most notable for having the good sense to cast Maisie Williams halfway through her Game of Thrones run and Florence Pugh in her first role. The pair play best friends at a strict English girls school in 1969 where Abbie’s (Pugh) sexual exploration and sudden and inexplicable death have a dramatic effect on Lydia (Williams). This is followed by other girls at the school showing similar symptoms to those of Abbie before her death in short unexplained fainting spells the administration of the school refuses to take seriously.
Written and directed by Carol Morley, the film’s exploration of mass hysteria and burgeoning female sexuality proves to be intriguing. However, after riding the edge of melodrama for much of its running time, the film eventually veers too far off the path of psychological thriller from which it never fully recovers.
Refusing to make a ruling on the cause of Abbie’s death or the faintings of the other students, for which no medical evidence can be found, leaves the film stuck during the final third as the administration’s response, although callous, certainly feels reasonable in sweeping events under the rug, expelling troublemakers like Lydia, and attempting to get back to normal. On the scale of what’s really going on, Lydia and a handful of others perpetrating a fraud isn’t strongly enough balanced by any alternative explanation leaving the story nowhere to go but dive back into Lydia’s dysfunctional homelife with the brother (Joe Cole) who slept with her best friend, and has amorous intentions to her, and her troubled mother (Maxine Peake).
While the highs of The Falling outweigh the lows, the film’s choice of ending leaves much to be desired with no resolution to larger events other than Lydia learning the truth behind her mother’s standoffish nature. Was the mass fainting in fact solved by Lydia’s departure from the school? Was her own condition her imagination or part of a ploy to take revenge as she imagines Abbie may have wanted? All of this is ignored for a less interesting mother/daughter resolution that suggests Lydia’s homelife may be slightly better moving forward but doesn’t tie back to the larger themes of the film.
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