‘Sound of Falling’ Review: What It Feels Like For a Girl [A-] Cannes
Early in Mascha Schilinski’s sophomore feature, Sound of Falling, Alma (Hanna Heckt) and her sisters play a prank on one of the maids. They know she’ll be coming into the house soon, and they decide to nail a pair of her clogs to the floor. When she returns, she steps into the shoes and falls forward with a thud just out of frame. At first, she doesn’t move, and just as the girls fear that their childish trick may have just ended in tragedy, she screams and startles them right back. It’s the film’s first literal use of its title, illustrating Schilinski’s dark sense of humor and sharp grasp of the playfulness and curiosity of youth, while teasing the finality of death. Sound of Falling is a stunning, fragmentary portrait of the inescapable wounds of girlhood observed through four generations living on the same rural German farm. Schilinski creates a coming-of-age tale that’s a tactile, plaited diary illuminated by the memories of Alma in the early 20th century, Erika (Lea Drinda) under the dark shadow of WWII, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the ‘80s in East Germany, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) growing up in the present day.
Six-year-old Alma, with her white blonde braids curled around her ears, is the audience’s first true view into the film’s peculiar, experimental rhythm. Schilinski’s camera follows her in a tracking shot before adjusting into her childlike POV, tilting downward to smooth out her funeral dress one minute and peeping through a keyhole to spy on a maid’s sexual proclivities the next. She’s innocent and curious, closely observing the world around her, and slowly becoming aware of just how grim life can be when death and suffering come to the surface. As Alma’s family somberly celebrates All Souls Day, it’s clear that they’re not trying to shield her from death at her young age and instead seem keen to establish its normalcy, just like the film’s morbid embrace of it. This is best depicted by the plethora of family funeral tableaux decorating their home–the living captured alongside the dead in each portrait. Schilinski knows that what’s eerie about this now macabre practice is that because the living couldn’t hold still, they were sometimes blurry, while the dead had no choice but to be completely stiff, rendering them crystal clear in the photographs. The ghosts in the images are not the dead but the living, a rich idea that Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter explore as the film bends and flexes to the present.
Sound of Falling does not move chronologically through a narrative and instead is boldly disjointed, moving backward and forward through time with stray, ephemeral images (an eel, a fly, a baby deer curled up in the grass) to connect the emotions and experiences of the four girls, despite their historic disconnect. The fact that the film is so captivating despite its tricky narrative structure speaks to Schilinski’s command of the form and her audacious vision. There isn’t much dialogue or dramatic tension, with characters using voiceover narration to recall memories of their mothers and sisters, almost as if a living relative were next to you, going through relics and memories from their past. A loose shot of limbs dangling in the water at first feels entirely out of place in the early 20th century and yet, when Schilinski and editor Evelyn Rack choose to repeat it in its right place narratively, it’s like finding an old photo album; the links between each girl’s story snapping into a place. Schilinski still favors ambiguity, though, as if she’s preserving some facets of the girls’ unearthed secret histories.
Cinematographer Fabian Gamper creates a stunning, painterly landscape with nature and time as the film’s two constants that link the women’s experiences with their home region of Altmark, a place that was central to World War II and the divide between East and West Germany. They may experience heartache, but Schilinski embraces the idea that it’s possible that the wartime setting has absorbed a bit of that too, not just from the century of women who’ve inhabited that house, but from the violence that’s taken place on the land. It’s a visually poetic vision that feels like a modern-day echo of the works of Bergman and Tarkovsky. The house they inhabit feels haunted, too, bearing witness to and soaking up a century’s worth of memories and life. Are these four generations of girls biologically connected, or does the home that they live in render their fates inevitable despite time’s forward progress? Maybe there are some universal experiences that all young girls can’t escape.
Angelika and Lenka learn these lessons when they experience the feeling of receiving their first leering gaze from a man who should know better. As Lenka decides to take her top off to run through the sprinkler with the other kids, she notices her parents’ friend staring at her. Schilinski and Gamper strikingly choose to obscure him, mirroring Lenka’s point of view and inner thoughts. Angelika feels similarly about intercepting these types of stares, stating in voiceover, “I’m watching them, but they don’t know that I know that they look at me.” Her more explicit experience with sexual abuse leads her to fantasize about death, imagining herself curling up next to that baby deer in the field, ready for the incoming harvester to crush her. It’s a brilliant way to capture the poisonous sting of how the perceptions of others can lead to some of the most brutal realizations of being a teenage girl, and the type of visual creation the film is most interested in depicting. They’re arresting images that reverberate like an echo between generations and out to the audience, lingering long after the credits.
While Sound of Falling’s fixation on death and dying and its coming-of-age focus will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, its depiction of the desire of girls to mimic both what they covet and what they don’t understand is perhaps most similar to Robert Altman’s off-kilter, dreamy exploration of womanhood, 3 Women. Like Altman, Schilinski illustrates how that spirit of imitation often stems from not knowing one’s true identity and the need to discover that through emulating another; it’s a rite of passage. In a particularly striking moment, Alma realizes that a dead girl in a funeral photo looks just like her. Her sister Lia (Greta Krämer) tells her that the girl’s name was also Alma. “But I’m Alma,” she worries, fixating on the girl’s posture and her baby dolls positioned next to her. She’s afraid (especially when she realizes that one of her dolls once belonged to the other Alma), but she later decides to imitate the pose on her own, fixing her hands to mirror her doppelgänger in the picture. For Erika, her form of imitation is perhaps the most startling, rigging up a contraption that allows her to practice moving around the house like an amputee. Her fascination with her Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), who lost his leg is palpable and strange, as she spies on him with a sometimes menacing adolescent gaze. Curiously, Schilinski introduces Fritz earlier in the film as Alma’s brother, with the reasons for his mutilation unexplained until much later, like the loose images that flutter in and out before settling into place. Not all of the forms of mimicry are dark, though. For Lenka, it’s simply choosing a strawberry popsicle instead of her favorite vanilla. The film ebbs and flows with a strangeness that doesn’t feel so strange in adolescence, each girl drawn to touch, smell, and taste what’s around them. It’s a tactile quality and an embrace of some of the most honest feelings of the characters that extends to adulthood. Despite the film’s bleak nature, it’s not without humor and moments of joy that flicker at its edges.
Schilinski’s camera and Alma and Erika’s eyes are drawn to the scar from that missing limb, conjuring up the idea of feeling pain from something that isn’t tangibly there. That dull, ever-present ache like a phantom limb feels like a phantom thread here, tying the girls together through history as if they have a fated connection not just to each other, but also to their mothers. Like all expertly told coming-of-age stories, Schilinski and Peter understand that just as the girls are growing up, their mothers are aging too. But in Sound of Falling, some characters absorb pain so visceral that it would be impossible not to pass it down to their daughters. Here, it’s depicted in loose threads like Angelika’s mother’s forced attempt at a smile, mirroring the face of her dead sister, Erika. Schilinski keeps some of the specificity of the biological links ambiguous, but it’s impossible not to see similarities in the lines in their faces and the parallels between their stories.
In Sound of Falling, Schilinski allows women over a nearly 100-year period to share the space they all once inhabited in an entirely new way, bringing to life the depth of their familial connections and their collective history. Their inherited and collected generational trauma is what binds them, but their communication was once limited to that, or as the images in this film suggest, through signs that they send each other. Even in death, Schilinski has found a way for these women to speak with each other and to keep them alive just a bit longer, maybe even forever.
Grade: A-
This review is from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where Sound of Falling premiered In Competition.
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