Carol Morley (1)

At a 1960's English girl school, ruled with Victorian values, friends Lydia (Masie Williams) and Abbie (Florence Pugh) have a strange relationship centred around nature, an old oak tree and a quiet occultism. When Abbie unexpectedly dies Masie starts having fainting spells which soon spread to the other girls much to the consternation of the principal and the teachers. Written and directed by Carol Morley who delivers a quiet, slow film that is full of understatement. Issues of mental illness, paranoia, incest and teenage pregnancy infuse the film. It has strange hints of the occult as well as a folk horror edge, made palpable by Tracey Thorn's haunting score. Morley's languorous direction provides a feeling of unease throughout with the whole film coming across as introspective and claustrophobic. It is an interesting, distancing film rather than a fully engaging one, but certainly one worth seeing.… (mais)

I watched Carol Morley's first feature film "The Falling" earlier this year (she's also an acclimated documentarian), and enjoyed both the film and her writing about it enough to seek out "7 Miles Out", her (very) lightly fictionalised memoir of her childhood and teenage years growing up in Stockport, Lancashire in the wake of her father's suicide. Although this might make the book sound like a "misery memoir", it's often very funny, and quite apart from its own merits it shed a great deal of light on the principal characters in "The Falling". Enjoyed and recommended.… (mais)