Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10
Cast: Maisie Williams, Maxine Peake, Florence Pugh, Anna Burett, Greta Scacchi, Rose Caton, Lauren McCrostie, Katie Ann Knight, Evie Hooten, Monica Dolan, Mathew Baynton, Morfydd Clark, Joe Cole.
The Falling is full of style, intrigue; a cast dominated by wonderful actresses and full of potential and yet, despite all this, leaves the cinema goer feeling flatter than an uncooked pancake sitting in a café, untouched, alone and as indigestible as a school meal in the 1970s.
The problem with The Falling is that it falls woefully short of what could be. It drives itself along to a point and then suddenly stops, starts again for a while and somewhere in between the driver realises that the map has been lost, thrown out the window in a fit of teenage angst and is now covering a weeping willow from its sad lamentable reflection.
It is easy to be drawn into such a film, the thought that you entering a world of your own choosing but fully comprehending that you are but a passenger in a ride of someone else’s design is an enticing one. It is the mix of danger, the element of hopeful surprise that makes the pulse race a little faster, the expected being pulled from underneath you – The Falling has all that, but there is no rug, just a slip here and there as the life of Maisie Williams’ character Lydia goes from scary to bonkers and onto disgruntled over the course of the film.
Therein lies the problem with the film, a group of school girls suffering from mass hysteria, teachers out of their minds as they watch a group of young teenagers descend into collective madness and the very disturbing relationship between Lydia and her brother, has all the hall marks of being a cult classic but the film honestly doesn’t know what it wants to be, it suffers from multiple film personality, neither one thing or the other. In the end suffers badly from an over-reaching and yet underwhelming slow descent into oblivion.
A film that boasts the talent of the tremendous Maxine Peake, of Greta Scacchi, Florence Pugh and Monica Dolan should not be subjected to the feeling of time being moved so distractingly slow that you cannot help look at your watch to make sure you haven’t nodded off and arrived at the same juncture in the film’s next showing. Yet somewhere along the line, the greatness that could have been is wasted. Lovingly shot, there is after all no complaint about the cinemagraphic feel, but like spending an hour in a line for the tuck shop to open only to find it is full of salad, the expectation does not get challenged.
The Falling declines its invitation to be a film of genuine and upstanding character, a real shame.
Ian D. Hall