Schoolgirls spice up their lives

THE BIG RELEASE OUR LADIES 15 ★★★★✩

THE Derry Girls get a big screen spin-off – in spirit at least – with this bouncy and irreverent sex comedy about Catholic schoolgirls behaving badly. Set in 1996, ‘before social media and mobile phones changed everything forever’, Our Ladies gallops us through a life-changing 24 hours in the lives of five shag-happy sixth-formers at a remote Highlands convent school (unofficial motto: ‘Bottoms up; knickers down’). Led by their long-suffering choir mistress, who they nickname Sister Condom (Kate Dickie), they’re heading off to Edinburgh to compete in a posh singing contest – but the girls, like this film, are far more interested in the extracurricular opportunities afforded by one lost afternoon in the big, bad city.

Packed with fizzy banter – ‘He’s beneath you Orla…’ ‘My position of choice!’ – it’s very much a product of the Spice Girls era. Each ladette has a defining characteristic: posh (Eve Austin), baby (Tallulah Greive), ginger (Rona Morison), scary (Marli Siu) and, er, secretly gay (Abigail Lawrie). That said, these characters aren’t completely one-dimensional. Each gets to reveal something unexpected about themselves and the ensemble cast is fit to bursting with authentic energy.

‘We had one thing on our mind – boys!’ declares our narrator (Greive), who is in remission for leukaemia. And while it’s great to see teenage girls unrepentantly owning their own sexual power on screen, you do start to wonder if their boy obsession is less down to their raging hormones and more about them being the sort of ‘naughty schoolgirls’ dreamt up by two older men. This movie is adapted from Alan Warner’s 1998 novel, The Sopranos (no, not the mafia TV series), by director Michael CatonJones (Memphis Belle, Basic Instinct 2).

However, if the script doesn’t capture the full zig-a-zig-ahh of female adolescence, it’s still an irresistible blast of girl power and, most importantly, a right laugh.