Critics reviews

With impressive support from Maxine Peake and Greata Scacchi, this is an intriguing piece of work which, for all its imperfections, deserves its second chance. There’s more to appreciate about if if you’ve followed Morley’s work since, and it’s a reminder of the importance of taking risks in filmmaking.

While cinematographer Agnes Godard’s lingering close-ups of emotion-charged faces, evocative shots of trees and water, and quick cuts to disturbing abstract imagery create an intensely emotional, sometimes vertiginous tone that mirrors the girls’ inner lives, the script is less assured.

The Falling is a film that begs to be understood until it veers so far off course that all interpretation seems impossible. Heroes are vilified and villains glorified — each scene is given a counterintuitive momentousness that is as baffling as it is enrapturing.

A tale of fevered faints and shared rapture as strange and mysterious as the swooning sickness at the heart of its narrative... The Falling trembles and twitches with so much unreadable meaning that it’s impossible to diagnose its hypnotic spell on first viewing – if at all.

The Falling is beguiling and disturbing, a beautifully made and very subtle affair that combines melodrama, rites of passage and supernatural elements in an utterly intriguing way... It's [the film's] attention to character that gives The Falling such resonance and stops it from ever seeming like simply a girlish and far-fetched teen fantasy.

[The Falling is] a very woolly, precious and nonsensical drama which flits and flails to its own off-tempo beat without a care in the world. In fact, a feeling of looseness, of casual naturalism is strained to the point where it looks as if the film is about to burst a blood vessel.

The Falling‘s themes of burgeoning sexuality and a woman’s right to her own body are veiled in a profuse shroud of paranormal evocations that recall Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Lucile Hadžihalilović Innocence... The Falling‘s refreshingly all-female perspective expects the viewer to become wholly caught up in its broad surge of feeling, yet there‘s something unsatisfactory and disaffecting about the film’s asinine finale.

[A] jawdropping mash-up of ‘If’ and ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’... [Morley] ratchets up the intensity to such fever-pitch, she can’t quite get the story back under control again. Yet in every other respect this dizzying, courageous, utterly humane and slightly unhinged film is a unique achievement.

What makes it so compelling and affecting is not (just) its bi visibility but that, through bisexuality, their characters and narratives are suffused with a love of the whole, wide world.

Peppered with arresting sonic breaks and rapid-fire surrealist imagery... “The Falling” sees Morley completing her departure from a documentary aesthetic... The film’s poised, eerie ambiguity can’t quite hold; clarity is achieved via a third-act plunge into flagrant melodrama.

There are so many acute insights, striking images and impressive performances in [The Falling], not least from lead Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones), it’s a tragic shame that elsewhere inexperience shows and the last 15 minutes devolve into a morass of melodramatic incident.

There’s real thematic density here, and at its best, [The Falling] refuses to give any simple answers, reveling in the complex, contradictory feelings that come with growing up. It’s a film of atmosphere and mood, and its unsettling quality is a hard one to shake, hours and days after the credits roll.