The Falls

An official record of the survivors of a catastrophe called the Violent Unknown Event. The camera works through 92 individuals one by one, and every surname begins with FALL: Falla, Fallabur, Fallaburr, Fallacie. The victims share symptoms. They dream of water, they develop an obsession with birds and flight, and some of them stop ageing. What the film is interested in is not what the disaster was, but how a bureaucracy files away something it does not understand. The cause of the VUE is never given. What is given instead is a case number, a statistic, a measurement. The form is mock documentary throughout, and it runs 185 minutes. The narration reads the most outlandish detail in the flattest possible civil service voice. That gap, between horror and the clerical language it has been squeezed into, is where the comedy lives. Peter Greenaway built this less like a feature than like a catalogue. His first conventional feature in the usual sense, The Draughtsman's Contract, came afterwards. What you are watching here is a filmmaker constructing his own system while nobody is yet asking him to justify it. Who it is for: anyone with an appetite for the humour of lists, catalogues and taxonomies, and the patience for experimental cinema. Who it is not for: viewers who want character and story. Across more than three hours there is no plot, only repetition. That is deliberate, and it is not for everyone.