Sound Of Falling – Review. By Oscar Aitchison.
A haunting, overly ambitious testimony to the lingering trauma suffered by women over generations and a mood piece wholly of its own.
With only her second feature film Mascha Schilinski has crafted a bold and unique vision akin to an art house rural nightmare. Winning the Jury Prize in 2025 at Cannes Sound of Falling is a difficult watch, not just because of its grim content but because of Schilinki’s fascinating restraint and haunting camera tricks. This is not a linear narrative by any stretch, more a collection of events spanning decades with ghostly threads tying them together. It doesn’t always work and can feel a frustrating creative exercise but the film will stick with you even if it bores you to tears.
Spanning from 1910 all the way to the 2020’s the film focuses on one German farmhouse resided in by four different families. While the surrounding characters of each family play important roles we largely focus on four women of varying ages. Alma (Hanna Heckt) in 1910 is a 7 year old girl living and observing farm life, although death pierces and rots every frame. The beahviour of adults towards young women not much older than her own are cast into question, like driving a horse and carriage into a burning barn the film asks us to imagine the pain on the other side of the scene. Violence against women and girls has only changed in the way it has become less immediately obvious and more fashionable to deny. You can’t just smack your daughter round the face like Alma’s father did in 1910 but modern day misogynists voice and enact this type of violence in secret or brazen openness every day. That or they can just pay their way out of it.
In the 1940’s Erika (Lea Drinda) lives on the farm with her teenage sister, her uncle has had his leg amputated after various farm labour incidents. Erika pretends to be disabled herself by binding her leg and observes her uncle as if he were an alien. These shots and stories are woven together out of order and drift in and out of each other. Sometimes it feels like we are an otherworldly presence that shouldn’t be there, watching intimacies or trauma unfold. Sometimes the links do not match up and the film tries too hard to instill its uncompromising vision – both impressive and overbearing. A linear narrative would not work for the style of Schilinki’s film but that leaves it open for a few meandering and overbaked moments.
In the 1980’s, the strongest section, we follow Angelika (Lena Uzendowsky) who lives on the farm with her mother Irm (Claudia Geisler), cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann) and uncle Uwe (Konstatin Lindhorst). Angelika is provocative and flirts with men, adopting a bolder approach to her femininity all while it’s exploited in different ways. There is a huge suggestion that her uncle Uwe is raping her though her jealous cousin Rainer describes it as “everyone knows you let him bang you”. There is a shameless crudeness to this that summerises the themes throughout the lens of time. No matter how you behave, no matter what era, you had it coming or it is just a part of life and one must stay silent or risk humiliation.
Once the film reaches the modern era, the slightest of the sections, we focus on Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) who lives in the now renovated, modern farmhouse with her parents and sister. She befriends a confident and outgoing yet mysterious girl named Kaya (Ninel Geiger) and appears at odds with her confusingly blasé yet affirming approach to life. It speaks to the muddle of what is considered “appropriate” female behaviour, how in each reality there are inner reckonings constantly going on and stories lost to time and period detail. The modern section is used sparingly and there’s a sense that Schlinski has manufactured it the most, she seems far more interested in past depictions but the jumbled construction largely remedies these quibbles.
THE VERDICT: 7/10
A lake by the farm is a recurring motif, a potentially dangerous and unguarded spot where a person might drown and if no one was around they would never hear the desperate splashing. Sound of Falling takes its time but it is not interested in straightforward entertainment because much as it is like life, the past, present and future will always carry buried secrets and numbing new ways to cut people down.
