At first glance Carol Morley – a funny, lively sort – isn't an obvious fit with her almost unbearably sad breakthrough film, Dreams of a Life (2011). Morley's portrait of Joyce Carol Vincent, who died in her North London bedsit in 2003 but was not discovered until 2006, catapulted her into conversations about the dreamy naturalism of Britain's new breed of female auteurs: Clio Barnard, Joanna Hogg, Andrea Arnold, and Lynne Ramsay.

There has, accordingly, been much anticipation and chatter around The Falling, Morley's first fictional feature film. Interestingly, Morley stuck with the same methodology she used for her earlier documentary work.

“I plotted it out exactly the same way,” she says. “I thought about what age the characters would be now or which of them would be dead. And what they would say about the events in the film now. It was a documentary in my head before it became a film. It sounds a bit mad. But it’s the only way I know.”

Early reviews have made favourable comparisons with Picnic at Hanging Rock and Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence. The central themes and atmospherics are certainly not dissimilar. Set in 1969, The Falling chronicles an unexplained fainting epidemic at an all-girls secondary school.

The film simultaneously suggests some kind of mass sexual panic and a spookier explanation.

"I really wanted to be ambiguous about that," says the writer-director. "And I'm delighted that people have mentioned Picnic at Hanging Rock. I looked to that film, and that whole school of film from Australia and New Zealand especially early Jane Campion – films like Sweetie."

Morley began researching mass hysteria when her old film teacher told her about "a medieval village where the villagers couldn't stop laughing". In 2006 she made a short movie called The Madness of the Dance, on mass manias and obsessions such as biting and trichotillomania. For The Falling she consulted the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Simon Wessely.

“Hysterias mostly happen in closed institutions,” says the filmmaker. “A lot of them happen in schools, and a lot of them happen to women as well. I think teenage girls talk to each other more, so they communicate their symptoms more, and I was fascinated with the idea that that could create a mass hysteria.”

Do the blazered, cloistered girls of The Falling echo the filmmaker's own education?

“No. This is like my fantasy school. I went to a big mixed comp. So the film is like my Hogwarts.”

A start in art

Born in Stockport, Morley, the youngest sister of music writer Paul Morley, left school at 16 to sing with various bands. She returned to education in her early 20s, to study film at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

“I think it would have been wasted on me if I’d gone straight from school,” says Morley.

It must have been a culturally literate household to have produced herself and Paul.

"I think there were six books in our house," she says. "And most of those were encyclopaedias. And I remember that by the time I came along most of the pictures had been cut out by the two older ones for school projects. I was 11 when Paul went down to London to work for the NME. It was a huge deal. But when he came home he went to his room and listened to music. So there weren't many cultural conversations going on."

Post- college, Morley returned to Manchester to make The Alcohol Years (2000), a startlingly honest auto-documentary piecing together Morley's life from the ages of 16 to 21, years lost due to heavy drinking and life at the Haçienda.

The director laughs and shakes her head: “What’s funny is that, now, when I’m doing interviews, or sometimes even just in conversation, someone will say something about me. And I’ll think ‘How do you know that?’ Oh. It’s in the film. There’s a lot in that film.”