A Captivating & Challenging Time-Warp Drama That Weaves Together Generations Of Story

Sound of Falling

begins with a younger woman named Angelika on crutches, one leg seemingly lacking as she struggles to stroll. Ultimately, she’s referred to as by her father and we see her raise up her skirt to untie her lacking leg, folding it down in opposition to the creaky picket flooring so she will stand on two toes once more. Angelika’s experiment, impressed by her Uncle Fritz, who is definitely lacking a leg, belies an obsession each with the ache that’s within the basis of their German farmhouse and Fritz himself.

It’s the primary of many placing sequences in director Masha Schilinski’s sophomore characteristic, a confounding and charming movie that tracks 4 generations of ladies residing in the identical farmhouse. In kaleidoscopic style, Schilinski pulls collectively the tales of those 4 women and their households in several eras of German historical past, inspecting how the occasions of the previous have a means of lingering and that, when checked out suddenly, time folds again in on itself till you now not know what got here first or when.

Sound Of Falling Is A Difficult Movie

It Begs For Repeat Viewings & Its Advanced Construction Can Be Isolating

If that sounds each complicated and charming, that’s as a result of it’s. Sound of Falling’s cinematic language, whereas wholly unique, left me feeling unmoored, clearly the intention of the story however performed so in a means that disorients as a lot because it stuns. There’s not a lot one singular story right here, however reasonably patterns and motifs that come collectively in painfully haunting methods.

The youngest of our batch of protagonists is Alma (Hanna Heckt), a strikingly blonde little woman who observes everybody in her household with the eager eyes of somebody seeing an excessive amount of too quickly. The big brood that lives on the sprawling farm retains many secrets and techniques — the rationale Fritz misplaced his leg, their mom’s mysterious sickness, the unusual dying of an older sister. These occasions are seen not with readability however by way of an opaque, childlike perspective.

This opacity doesn’t preclude Alma from lacking out on the violence of her period, nor does it save the opposite women — Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) — from their very own types of hurt, self-inflicted or doled out by the boys of their households. On the cusp of maturity — whether or not by age or by circumstance — these women are formed by what occurs to them and round them.

It’s a harsh and difficult lifestyle that’s depicted, but it surely isn’t isolating for these causes. Fairly, the isolation comes from the narrative time-jumping, which might make sure occasions, folks, and even photos exhausting to maintain monitor of. As soon as we get a grasp of who’s who and when is when, Sound of Falling permits itself to move freely between time durations and recollections. When you can’t get your footing early on within the movie, a few of its subtler moments are misplaced within the shuffle.

It is not exhausting to see that Schilinski is working on a wavelength that ought to launch her into a brand new part of her burgeoning profession.

I think about that Sound of Falling will reward repeat viewings. There’s nearly an excessive amount of to absorb upon first look, a long time of life condensed into two and a half hours. Schilinski’s imaginative and prescient is so assured and so bracing that it is exhausting to not be arrested by what’s taking place onscreen, even for those who’re undecided what is going on on.

The director frames many pictures as glimpses by way of keyholes, cracked doorways, and from under window sills, as if, like the ladies on the farm, we’re witnessing issues not meant to be seen. It provides the movie a foreboding environment, particularly when the implicit turns into express.

In the end, Sound of Falling is concerning the violence that society inflicts upon these younger women by the people who find themselves presupposed to look after them — an entrusted neighbor, a predatory uncle, a younger cousin. It is by no means macabre and although it is exhausting to totally grasp in a single viewing, it is not exhausting to see that Schilinski is working on a wavelength that ought to launch her into a brand new part of her burgeoning profession.

Sound of Falling premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition.