Directed by Jordan Scott

This debut film from the daughter of Ridley Scott is a heady mix of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and a ripping yarn from Angela Brazil. In the hothouse, gymslipped atmosphere of a thirties girls' boarding school on a bosky island, Miss G (Eva Green) is the svelte object of desire and admiration of the little group she calls her Team, headed by Di (Juno Temple). Not only does this superior set share a dormitory, they also form the school diving team, practising under Miss G's supervision in the chilly lake. It's a melodramatic tale of schoolgirl passions and allegiances, but its daffiness is soon augmented by a strange dreamlike quality which emerges from the moment Miss G is seen striding her way through the school hall with her fashionable clothes and sharp looks, seemingly of quite a different world to the rest of the stuffy schoolmarms, so different in fact that for a while she might almost have been a kind of spectre conjured by the aching adolescence of the girls.

Miss G holds the girls in thrall with her style and her romantic tales of travel and adventure, with Di as her first lieutenant, until the arrival of the beautiful Fiamma (Maria Valverde), a Spanish girl sent to the school under some kind of mysterious cloud (though you can be sure it has something to do with sex), and her unassuming but clearly experienced voice from the outside world trumps all Miss G's tales, as her nonchalance and maturity put the small-time affairs of school into a different light.

The girls seem to have an enormous freedom to roam at will around the woods, in great contrast to the apparently strict censoring of their outgoing post, and Miss G takes them skinny dipping at midnight. They begin to seem like prisoners given the freedom only of their prison. Girls trapped in their adolescent dreams. The febrile atmosphere intensifies as cracks start to appear in Miss G's confident facade and we begin to see that she is not all she seems. Clunking clues to what skulduggery might occur come with the self-assured Fiamma's reliance on her inhaler for breathing problems. But somehow this doesn't matter, it's the nightmarish feel of something building to a deadly unavoidable crisis that takes over. The more we see of the island itself the odder the whole set up seems - the locals all ogle and mock Miss G on her shopping trips to the village, leaving her in a panic, and what on earth is that Battersea-power-station-like edifice glimpsed in the distance? And why is it the diving team, always practising, never has any competition with other schools? Anything beyond the island seems unattainable, until the bond is broken in the most horrible way.

It's a confident debut with a pleasing weirdness, a simple, potentially hackneyed story made into stronger meat by a seductive atmosphere which seems to always be expressing more than meets the eye.