Time strictly dominates the élite Alstroemerias Academy in the Virginian backwoods where recently orphaned teen Miriam Basconi (Sophia Anthony) has just been sent. For here, as senior pupil Holden Sax (Dante Blake) informs Miriam upon her arrival, “the clock is king,”.Yet Miriam’s impunctuality marks a more general recalcitrance, as she refuses to operate like clockwork or to surrender to the many exacting rules of the Headmistress Ms Hemlock (Velvet). As Miriam finds herself subjected to “hazing clichés”, bullying and all the usual pressures of a boarding high school, it is her resistance, her unwillingness to bow down to convention, that distinguishes her from everyone else, and threatens to undermine the status quo. This makes Daniel Lerch’s feature debut Saturnalia, co-written with Julia Nilsen and Darrell Workman, follow the typical trajectory of a teen’s transgressive rites of passage. At the same time, there is something deeply sinister going on in this establishment, where pupils disappear during the night never to return, and where Hemlock’s invasion of her ward’s private spaces shifts readily from pastoral concern to open abuse.

Old man Saturn was the Roman god of time, and Saturnalia comes under his sign. It is not just the film’s title – in fact the word for the Roman festival of feasts, gift-giving and rôle reversals that celebrated both the god Saturn and the winter solstice, and would eventually become syncretised with Christmas – but also the literal sign of Saturn (♄) displayed all over the Academy. There are also carved faces of the god in the building’s corners and niches, the ringed planet Saturn recurs on the wallpaper of the pupils’ bedrooms, and a copy of Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son is prominent in Hemlock’s private office.

Certainly something untoward is happening to the children here. For in the very opening sequence, schoolgirl Gilda (Lillian Couchoud) is shown running through the Academy’s hallways in the wee hours, and fleeing down an old spiral staircase into a basement where she is trapped and half-hanged, half-garrotted by a masked figure. The stylised blue, red and green lighting, the baroque sets, the grotesquely elaborate nature of the murder, and even the black gloves worn by the killer, all point to the Italian whodunnit genre known as giallo, Yet Lerch has a more specific reference in mind – for when, after this prologue, we see Miriam taking a cab in the pouring rain to the Academy, we are clearly meant to think of Dario Argento’s supernatural thriller Suspiria (1977), whose title similarly is a Latin word beginning with an ’S’ and ending in ‘ia’, and whose heroine similarly is first seen traveling by taxi to an Academy during a torrential rainstorm. It helps that this film’s score is also composed by Claudio Simonetti, and that the lead actress Anthony bears more than a passing resemblance to Argento’s daughter Asia, who starred in many of the giallo king’s subsequent films.

“Place has been there for a very long time. After the civil war, a lot of carpetbaggers came down here to fix the place, with their – Eurocentric thinking…”. This is the cabbie (Brian K. Landis), telling Miriam that the Academy has old foundations but is essentially a European folly. He might just as well be describing Saturnalia itself, a classic horror modelled on overt giallo influences whose very artificiality has become built in as part of the American architecture. Herself something of a cinephile, Miriam expressly likens stern, sadistic Ms Hemlock to Nurse Ratched from Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – although perhaps Miriam has not yet been able to see Suspiria itself, given her own relatively young age, the film’s R-rating and recent release, and the fact that home video was still in its infancy in 1979 when Saturnalia is set.

What Miriam, traumatised by her parents’ bloody deaths and prone to extravagant dreams, will find in the forbidden lower floors of the building is both criminally corrupt practice and a Saturnine ritual, with the one reflected by the other like a nightmare through a glass darkly. Either one involves the older generation devouring and absorbing its young – something that an adolescent rebel like Miriam simply cannot countenance – and so the film heads towards a clash of the generations that is as oneiric as it is mythic. One might even say that it is never-ending, or in a word, timeless.

The world premiere of Saturnalia takes place during the 33rd edition of Raindance, which is held between June 18th and 27th.