the Falling: (2014. dir: Carol Morley) Inspired by a Fortean phenomenon known as "falling sickness", a hysterical contagion traditionally rising up in girls' schools or convents (see here) this movie has self-conscious pretentions towards Picnic at Hanging Rock. It fails in that direction because it cannot leave its mystery alone, but must turn over every rock, literalize and spell out the urge behind every nuance. Similarly, Maisie Williams' acting style, which can be refreshingly simple and candid in Game of Thrones, is altogether too literal to carry this off, a role which demands subtlety, demands secrets.
Still, a wonderful thing happened about halfway into this film: I realized that I was being shown the story almost exclusively from the feminine point of view. Men, all men, are entirely sidelined here, their opinions and feelings almost wholely discounted as unimportant. It's a wonderful relief, allowing a feeling of exploration, of charting unknown territory. The women are downtrodden, yes, sometimes neurotic, trapped by the actions and opinions of men, but it is only women's reactions to their own hardships which are of interest to this film-maker, and it is a revelatory experience. The sole exception is when she lets us into the brother's head for a piece, and it's a mistake. She does it (I assume) because she thinks it will help make palatable a particularly delicate and pivotal plot-turn if we know that he was enchanted by the doomed girl, that she wasn't just another conquest for him. It doesn't, and it was a mistake to try. I mean, the plot-turn might have been made palatable, but she didn't accomplish it, and some level of purity the film might have had without the boy's intrusion is diluted. In the end, it all seems a bit contrived.
*SPOILER ALERT*
the Moth Diaries: (2011. dir: Mary Harron) If the Falling failed because it was too literal, this one fails because it wants to have its metaphysical cake and still call it psychological. Are the strange goings-on manifestations of a teenaged girl's journey from the darkness of her father's suicide into redemption? Or is there indeed a vampire amongst the budding pubescents?
The director of American Psycho stays perhaps too true to the novel this time. Any power wielded by a first-person narration on the page is often lost once it's imprisoned in flickering light, and the transition doesn't work here. If this is the story of a girl's psychic journey through madness into new life, then why are people dying? Is that all in her head? If people really are dying, then who's killing them? Rebecca herself? The vampire/ghost girl who so eerily mirrors her in circumstance and obsessive nature? In the denouement, when we are given to believe it's all just been a chrysalis stage leading up to Rebecca's fiery release from the bondage of her childhood torment, it feels embarrassingly simplistic. Two deaths, an expulsion, and a terrible fire, all to further one girl's psychological healing? If it worked in the Young Adult novel, it must have been because print allows for an ambiguity which only the best film-makers (like Peter Weir) can conjure, and Harron doesn't come near to making this work.
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