Directed and written by Carol Morley, this stars Maisie Williams and Florence Pugh in early roles as Lydia Lamont and Abbie Mortimer, classmates at a British girl school in the late 60s. Lydia is fixated on Abbie, who is already pregnant by one boy and attempts to abort it by making love to another, Lydia’s brother Kenneth (Joe Cole).

While in detention together, Abbie has a fainting spell, goes into convulsions and dies while Lydia watches. Soon, these fainting spells spread through the school, and even one young teacher has one. No one will investigate the reasons until a mass spell at an assembly closes the school. Abbie is expelled,d and soon, her mother (Maxine Peake) learns that her daughter and son are having an incestuous romance. Well, they’re only half-brother and sister, as the reasons why the mother is agoraphobic are revealed: Abbie is the child of rape.

Running through the night, the mother finally leaves the house, only to watch her daughter nearly die as she falls from a tree into a lake. It takes that to bring her back to reality, to show emotion.

According to Lancet Psychiatry, this movie is “a remarkably accurate adaption of an authentic paper, published in 1973 in the newly formed Psychological Medicine, describing an epidemic of fainting in a north London girls’ school.” That would be Hilda’s Girls’ School in Blackburn, England, in 1965.

I love how author Simon Wessley described the movie: “In the end, the film leaves no room for ambiguity that the phenomena described must reflect powerful psychological and social forces, but considerable ambiguity as to why these events unfolded as they did.”

This has echoes of Picnic at Hanging Rock, If… and The Crucible, yet it is very much its own movie. It’s filled with ideas, and I hope Morley makes something else this intense.

You can watch this on Tubi.