Often, it’s the youngest performers who find it hardest to counterfeit spontaneous reactions. Some of the world’s most highly-regarded child actors have got by on a style which owes more to dedicated rote-learning than to any insightful engagement with real-life behaviour. It’s when you see a performance as engaging as that of Catinca Untaru in The Fall that you remember what is so often missing from portrayals of childhood: the mischief, the flippancy, the anarchic disregard for adult conventions. Children at the heart of lush, epic fantasy films can appear particularly pallid: even Alice is a conservative force in Wonderland, pining for convention while logic breaks down around her. As Alexandria in The Fall, Catinca Untaru is a delightful exception. No passive observer or fretful nag, she engages passionately and actively with the world shown to her by bedbound storyteller Roy (Lee Pace) as they both convalesce in hospital. Although the film’s jaw-dropping fantasy sequences were shot in a remarkable twenty-four countries, and feature imagery of startling complexity, Untaru’s impish turn ensures that her more grounded scenes with Roy are a no less vivid part of the film.

Stuntman Roy is ostensibly recovering from a back injury sustained at work (it’s the 1920s, and masked brigands who jump trains are big in his business). The real problem, however, is the recent loss of his girlfriend to another man. Alexandria provides welcome companionship, but as Roy spirals into deeper depression, elements from his disturbed psyche infect his narrative. Director David Fincher (Se7en; Fight Club) caught The Fall‘s blend of the warm and the wayward when he described it as “what would’ve happened if Andrei Tarkovsky had made The Wizard of Oz” – although Alejandro Jodorowsky is perhaps a closer reference than Tarkovsky for The Fall’s ritualistic rearrangement of the visceral, the mystical, and the everyday.