The cinematic precedents for Jordan Scott’s debut Cracks loom large over every frame. A pinch of Picnic at Hanging Rock here, a dash of Prime of Miss Jean Brodie there, and a sprinkling of Lord of the Flies everywhere.

And yet, the modest miracle of the movie is how Scott ploughs ahead regardless to deliver her own startlingly unique take on repressed desires and distaff rivalries in a 1930s boarding school for girls.

Here the quasi-mythical setting is the fictional Stanley Island, off the Norfolk coast, where the girls of St Matilda’s swoon daily before the liberated glamour of a games mistress called Miss G (Eva Green).

She is a fantastic screen creation who stomps around the first half of the movie with a Katherine Hepburn swagger, spitting out dubious epigrams (“Set yourself free from the shackles of conformity, girls!”), and only occasionally looks, well, just a bit mad.

It’s a smart, sleight-of-hand performance that answers initial eccentricities and inconsistencies with a thundering final-reel pay-off. Foremost among Miss G’s doting pupils is Di Radfield (Juno Temple, channelling Vivien Leigh in a gleefully spiky turn), captain of the school diving team, and an imperious brute whose world implodes with the arrival of an exotic Spanish wonder student called Fiamma (Maria Valverde).

Naturally, Miss G is besotted with the new addition, Di’s heart is duly broken, and the stage is set for a battle between Fiamma and the local gals that will have dark and ultimately murderous consequences.

In all this, Scott proves a quietly confident storyteller and stylist. Only occasionally does she submit to the Scott family (father Ridley and uncle Tony) addiction to smoke machines — some indoor mist wafts inexplicably through a Sunday Service.

For the rest of the movie she is led completely, and admirably, by scene and character while the performances that she has coaxed from her leading ladies suggest genuine greatness to come.

Cracks is playing at The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival tomorrow (Vue 5, 6pm; Vue 7, 6:15pm) and on Wednesday, October 28 (Rich Mix Screen 1, 8:45pm)

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