Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

FountainPen Brilliant storyline which could have resulted in a powerful, positive movie, but this production falls flat, with lots of ups and downs, unhappily. The film is plagued by a few nasty, loud songs apparently by below-par folk "artistes"; these annoying puerile songs should have been deleted or replaced with something appropriate. and appealing Most reviews rate this flick very low. I noticed two that gave a 10/10 rating!! Hmmm. When I checked (am always very suspicious about 10/10 ratings for movies that average below 6/10), I found that both these "reviewers" have rated only ONE movie on IMDb, yes, this film. These are their headings: "Let's not confuse uncomfortable with bad." by SusanGinny and "Loved it!" by jax-37159. Hmmm!About 35 minutes in, the film pretty much dies for a while, as things come virtually to a dead stop, as though the entire cast and crew had decided to take a break! There's a scene in which two characters do not speak for about a minute, just sit holding hands (the boy fondling the girl)! What sort of direction is THAT? Significance? A few minutes later, there's another irritating song by a silly, drippy singer: what am I missing? What was the meaning? Lost on me. A couple of minutes later the song or another pops up briefly, for no reason. What's going on? 48 minutes in another song with loud solo guitar cuts in "The moon is like a boat, my love, with lemon peel afloat, my love..." HUH? This ditty is sung by the character Abbie, but what the heck does it mean? Incidentally, the superbly beautiful Florence Pugh, born January 1996, plays Abbie; I predict a very bright future for this actress. Anyway, WHO decided on all the music? Good grief! Just a minute later yet ANOTHER irritating loud loud song assaults our ears "I've been waiting for a long time" sung by a lad in a high-pitched voice. This is too damn much. Horrible. By now I just feel like turning off the DVD player and reading a book. As the film continues, there's more hideous, inappropriate, raucous music! Really testing my patience ~ the "music" in this film is a huge put-off. I'll set aside consideration of the strange event happening in this film, at a girls' school, as others have dealt with that and you can read it online... no, it's nothing to do with the music! I will say that the occurrence of the event is repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated.... BORING! We got the idea after the 6th time, thank you!!I'll rate this movie 3/10, cannot go higher, all considered. In other hands, I believe this story could be re-scripted, the oddball music deleted, and made into a film that would rate at least 6/10. #

James Hitchcock "The Falling" is set in an English girls' school in 1969. This is a day school rather than a boarding school, but it nevertheless has something of the strict public-school ethos about it. Abigail "Abbie" Mortimer and Lydia "Lamb" Lamont, two pupils at the school, are best friends. Indeed, it is implied that they may be more than just good friends, although whether they are actually having a lesbian relationship is never made explicit. In any case, Abbie cannot be exclusively lesbian as we learn that she has become pregnant by a boyfriend. And then the film starts to get very weird.Abbie dies suddenly, with no real explanation given beyond the fact that she was pregnant. (Pregnancy is not, of course, a terminal illness, but writer/director Carol Morley seems to have been under the impression that it is). Starting with Lydia, girls at the school, and one of the younger teachers, begin to suffer from unexplained fainting spells, and although investigations are carried out, no physical, medical or psychological explanation is ever produced. The headmistress, however, seems to believe the whole thing is, for some obscure reason, Lydia's fault and expels her from the school. Lydia responds to her expulsion by beginning an incestuous relationship with her brother Kenneth, but the reason why she reacts in this way remains as mysterious as everything else in this film.Marlow's first mistake is to kill Abbie off so early on, as Florence Pugh makes her about the only interesting character in the film. Thereafter Lydia moves to the centre of the action, but Maisie Williams never manages to hold our interest in the same way. Unusually for a British period film there is little real sense of the period in which it is set. About the only sixties touch is a brief reference to a stylophone, a curious electronic musical instrument popular during the decade. There is no sense that this was the era of the Beatles, flower-power and free love; we are rather left with the idea that it was a time of a suffocating sexual and emotional repression. The language sounds too modern; nobody in the sixties would have used the expression "She was, like…." To mean "And then she said…..". Even the name "Abbie" sounds more 2010s than 1960s. (The few youthful Abigails about fifty years ago generally shortened their name, if at all, to "Gail" rather than "Abbie").The film was made (and it shows) on a very low budget, only £750,000, petty cash by Hollywood standards or even by the standards of more ambitious British film-makers, but even so managed to make a financial loss, earning less than two-thirds of that sum. Despite its lack of box-office appeal, it was praised by some critics, who compared it to a number of earlier movies, including Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now". There are, admittedly, certain correspondences between "The Falling" and those two films. All three have a general air of mystery about them, and "The Falling" shares with Weir's film the theme of intense, possibly sexual, friendships between pupils at a girls' school. With Roeg's film it shares a pervading presence of water and the death of a character by drowning.All that goes to show, however, is that two films can resemble one another superficially and yet vary enormously in character and in quality. "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and "Don't Look Now" are masterpieces, two of the greatest films of the seventies, films whose air of mystery is a virtue and which present us with characters we can identify with and care about. Both Weir and Roeg are masters in the art of composing a shot and of pacing the action so as to produce an enthralling movie, and both had some very gifted actors at their disposal."The Falling" is very far indeed from being a masterpiece. Morley is unable to achieve the visual beauty which is a hallmark of Weir and Roeg's films. Where their films were permeated with a haunting sense of mystery, hers is simply baffling as well as hysterical and overwrought in tone. With the partial exception of Pugh, none of the actors stand out. I doubt if anyone will ever class "The Falling" as one of the greatest films of the current decade. 3/10

851222 Greetings from Lithuania.Oh my god, i can't believe that i just applauded by the end of the movie. First time in many many moons, i have applauded not for that it was a good movie, but for that it Finally ended. What a terrible, boring, uninvolving, self pretentious "The Falling" (2014) is. I'm always open to any kind of movies, but only if it is made interestingly and is involving. The story can be biggest nonsense, but if it is made with some skill that glues you to the screen, i'm in for a ride. "The Falling" had nothing that could kept my attention during it's exhausting 1 h 37 min run. This movie dragged beyond anything i've recently watched. The story was so ... bizarre that i barely made though this painful movie in a week, limiting my watch for like 15 min a day - this piece of garbage should be used as a torture devise to terrorists to blow their minds.Overall, "The Falling" makes me angry, that movies like these are being made at all. There is anything that resembles anything close to a compelling motion picture. The only thing that saved this garbage from vote 1 were a quite good songs used in this movie. Listen the soundtrack, and avoid this piece of trash at any cost.

jax-37159 This film evoked many memories from school days in an all girls grammar school, especially as I was watching it as part of a reunion with my old school friends. I was fascinated from the first scene... at times disturbing and at others strangely amusing, I both laughed and screamed out loud! A dark tale about teenage girls, single sex education, family conflict and the importance and impact of teenage peer groups. The film successfully recreated the sixties era with a fantastic cast led by Maisie Williams and Maxine Peake, who are both spectacular in complex and compelling roles. The film is beautifully directed by the talented Carol Morley in a departure from her usual gritty realism. Not at all what I was expecting but intriguing and well worth watching.