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| Director Mascha Schilinski |
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| Jury Prize at Cannes |
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| Behind the scenes |
SOUND OF FALLING (In die Sonne schauen) A Germany (155 mi) 2025 d: Mascha Schilinski
I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. —Robert Bresson
I want the audience to feel the film before they understand it. —Director Mascha Schilinski
Horribly grim, but brilliantly complex, operating on so many different levels and time periods, expressing the beauty of metaphysical passages, yet it’s all juxtaposed together in multiple layers with a uniquely abstract, stream-of-conscious storyline that may as well be a ghost story reverberating from our distant past. Haven’t seen a film this ferociously original since Lynne Ramsay’s 2025 Top Ten List #2 Die My Love, perhaps the only two working directors who could make a film like this, so, of course, both films were shut out of Academy Award nominations. While it may not be for everyone, difficult, and at times alienating, as the subject matter delves into the grotesque aspects of misogyny, suicide, incest, dismemberment, forced sterilization, and sexual assault, yet seen through the eyes of children, all young adolescent girls, leaving images seared into our brains, documenting, more than anything, female subjectivity, where this feels so essential, like a necessary expression of who we are, as opposed to who we pretend to be, creating a haunting piece of cinema that hits you like a ton of bricks. Films like this are a reminder of the power of movies. Undeniably ambitious, yet extremely challenging, with no real lead character in a fragmented narrative, instead the main character is a place that captures the full weight of history, like a silent witness, instantly becoming one of the more powerful, yet devastating films you could ever hope to see, a physical experience that challenges the viewer, yet what’s so compelling is the abstract editing style and the intensive scrutiny behind the making of the film, three years in development under the working title The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue, which comes from a Tom Waits song, where just the casting process alone lasted a full year, auditioning more than 1400 girls to find just the right faces for the four main characters the filmmaker was looking for. Winner of the Jury Prize (3rd Place) at Cannes, never before in the festival’s long history has a female German director been recognized with one of the top prizes, though Marin Ade’s 2017 Top Ten List #2 Toni Erdmann was scandalously neglected, this is as unsettling a film as you will find in theaters today, a poignantly aesthetic and sensual work, yet the impressionist vision pulling it all together is remarkable, an intelligent mix of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009) and Sarah Polley’s 2023 Top Ten List #1 Women Talking (2022), though some have compared it to Sofia Coppola’s THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999), or even Andrei Tarkovsky’s elusive narrative structure in MIRROR (1975), but it also recalls the complexity of Julie Dash’s multi-generational Daughters of the Dust (1991), particularly its inspiring use of an unborn child as a narrator. Taking us on a labyrinthian journey, using a variety of innovative techniques, shooting each period exclusively in the summer, what stands out is the chilling atmosphere that literally haunts the film with a suffocating presence, breathing a sense of profound disquiet as the events that unfold are echoes of the violence happening all around them, coming from an era when women were viewed as expendable and expected to suffer in silence, in this case a deafening silence. One character acknowledges, “It’s funny how something can hurt that’s no longer there,” which may as well be the overriding premise of the film, becoming a shockingly tender and moving reflection on resilience and the ripple effects of inherited trauma, a mirror to the nation’s brutal and tormented history, exposing a national trauma playing out in the personal lives of German families living in a land bursting with life and shadowed by death, yet despite an uncommon length, it’s hard not to be affected by the morally reprehensible nature of what we’re seeing.
After spending a summer on the farm in the Altmark region in the deep countryside halfway between Berlin and Hamburg, Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter developed an understanding of the region where the film is set, historically defined by decades of turmoil, including two world wars and Germany’s East-West divide, bordered by the Elbe River, the dividing line between East and West Germany, which is how far the Russian Army advanced at the end of WWII, becoming part of the Soviet occupation zone that comprised East Germany. The farmhouse where the film was shot remained empty for 50 years, yet everything was still in place, both struck by how little it had changed, allowing the filmmakers to view old photographs that told their own story, revealing a decided lack of female perspective, so the film became an urgent act of remembering, a reimagining of what might have happened there, telling stories that are largely absent from history. This is one instance where the English title is actually preferable to the German translation “Looking Into the Sun,” which is more reminiscent of the mythical tale of Icarus. One of the sources of inspiration was American photographer Francesca Woodman (Francesca Woodman | Alternate Stories), whose ghostly use of a blurred image simulated floating or flying, creating a sense of urgency and movement, while one of the central themes is psychological and physical violence, not exclusively directed toward women, but mostly. Among the most harrowing is a son chased down by his own parents in an intentionally inflicted “work accident,” resulting in a loss of limb in order to prevent him from going off to war, elevating a prevailing sense of trauma that is an ordinary, everyday reality, not necessarily big, impactful moments, but more often than not smaller, quiet moments. He shows up as a grown man in an introductory sequence that shows a young girl playfully exploring the hallways and rooms of the house, hopping around on one leg with crutches, emulating his tragic condition, but the only sound we hear is an insistent male voice outside screaming for her to help bring the pigs into the barn. When she finally does make an appearance, she’s met by a hard, abusive slap in the face, which is a kind of a wakeup call for what we are about to see as the title quietly graces the screen. The film is essentially four interconnecting stories in no chronological order about four different young women, always surrounded by an omnipresence of death, with each providing their own voiceover narration, as we see Alma (Hanna Heckt), the face we’re most likely to associate with this film, a young, observant blond girl in pigtails whose seriousness is overwhelming, mostly seen wearing a white apron and clogs, Erika (Lea Drinda), a teen living with a cruel father during World War II that we see in the opening, perhaps the most traumatic period of German history, whose life and death comes with a haunting reminder of the Mass suicide in Demmin, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a coming-of-age girl whose mother is Erika’s sister, desperately wanting to escape the confines of the farm in the 1980’s and the dangerous attractions within her own family, specifically her uncle and cousin, becoming painfully aware of the power her pre-pubescent body holds over men, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler from Frédéric Hambalek’s What Marielle Knows (Was Marielle weiß), released a few months earlier), a seemingly happier young woman in contemporary times, yet who is also touched by sadness, a curious modern day extension of the previous three. Fiercely defiant, the unraveling mysteries remain unexplained, as the film revolves around connecting lives and conversations that are largely unspoken, often incomprehensible, but the astute inner narrations offer some semblance of internalized self-reflective poetry that transcend what we are seeing, literally taking us into elevated realms.
Not really told in any particular order, meandering back and forth, using a fragmentary, collage-like mosaic that unites characters from different eras spanning an entire century, something akin to the remarkable, multi-generational Gabriel Garcia Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, starting in the early 1900’s before WWI, moving to the tragic circumstances of the Second World War (neither war is ever seen, only the consequences), the East German Republic during the 1980’s, and present-day Germany, the film shifts between four different time periods which all run together, with no discernable difference, seemingly in conversation with one another, as they’re all set on the same rural farm, with a courtyard and barn, yet it captures, with remarkable precision, the nonlinear nature of memory, where the echoes of the past reverberate into the present. With a multitude of characters and a large ensemble cast, including many children, there is little dialogue in the film, with Schilinski indicating we usually don’t remember words and sentences, as it’s the feelings that remain. With a restrained visual language that leans on her husband Fabian Gamper’s 4:3 format cinematography to create an immersive, intensely subjective, painterly world, where the camera glides through interior domestic spaces like the disembodied ghost of an earlier era, this gives the film a very distinct claustrophobic look, noted for its dark, immersive atmosphere and unique sound design, while the women in particular must endure the intrusiveness and patriarchal oppression of the men on the small farm. Camera angles and at times unsettling editing amplify the emotions of the different characters, while visual effects like the use of daguerreotypes, candlelit interiors, Super 8, keyhole settings, cracked doors, extreme close-ups, color filters, underwater sequences, lens flares, and sweeping camera movements that overwhelm, while still contributing to the density of the film’s entangled narrative. There is a jovial playfulness in playing pranks, but not everyone laughs, as some find it more humiliating than fun, so when we discover the brutal, sadistic ways that women are treated within this community, daughters barbarically sold to neighboring farmers, or maids sent away so they can be “prepared for the men,” victims of a cruel practice of forced sterilizing so that the men will have full access to them sexually, literally normalizing rape, as one of the younger maids is seen viciously chased down at night, with no one lifting a finger to come to her aid, your heart just sinks. Using a pace that is ponderous, with the present and the distant past speaking to each other in unexpected ways, what this film gradually reveals are the collective ways in which women’s lives are shaped by seen and unseen socio-political forces, and in which inherited transgenerational trauma forges a kinship which can only be sensed, not grasped, like an invisible protagonist. It’s not only Alma who is haunted by memories that she hasn’t actually experienced herself, but so have the other young women and girls who unconsciously repeat gestures, words, and actions, while discovering faces in images that resemble their own, with a recurring motif of faces being blurred in photographs, made all the more poignant by the innocent voices of child narrators. Fantasy becomes a realm in which protagonists articulate their historical despair, as Angelika waves red flags to signal her father’s harvester combine toward her direction, then curls up next to a dead fawn in a wheat field directly into the path of its blades. The scene is all within her head, a suicidal ideation that is fiercely intrusive and vivid, rhyming with another scene in which Lenka, abandoned after swimming with her family, imagines wrapping herself in a towel, then tumbling down the banks of the river Elbe to drown, mirroring the final sequence in Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), Robert Bresson, Mouchette, final YouTube (3:26). The line between real and fantasy is blurred, nearly indistinguishable, in this staggeringly provocative effort from which there is no escape, making this deeply engaging viewing experience all the more emotionally impactful.
As grandiose as it is radically staged, there is a droning sound that accompanies the leaps through time, reminiscent of the whoosh of wind rustling through tree branches, which becomes associated with the film’s title, the sound of people falling through time. An existential threshold between life and death, capturing the psychic interiors, this powerful, genre-defying film highlights the demand for unconventional narrative techniques, but is also evidence of the global nature of feelings. What unites these women across the generations are similar experiences and repetitive patterns of exploitation, adaptation, and oppression, about a lust for life and a longing for death, about the silent screams against oppression, as they live in a patriarchal-authoritarian system which is populated by the spirits of the past. Schilinski makes the historical personal, as she reminds us the memories that truly shape us are not always those born out of great catastrophes, but rather the small, everyday moments whose significance we seldom grasp while living them. We sense something unnamed in the young girl Alma, who bears the name of a deceased sister who died when she was Alma’s current age, yet we see something stirring from deep within as she gazes at an old photograph of her, with an apparition-like mother whose face is blurred, and then imitates her sister’s pose on the sofa, dressed in the same clothes, yet there are no words to describe this feeling, only the image of Alma, eyes closed, hands resting just as her sister’s once did. Sensual and sensory, their shared desires and distress, their secrets and truths, all rise to the surface, as if dredged from the past, where their encounters with another’s gaze reveal a defiant gaze in return. Though separated by time, far-reaching resonances emerge as echoes of experience linger in the air. With remarkable fluidity, Schilinski creates invisible connections between eras that suggest how women constantly battle repression and misogyny, yet also find pockets of grace and beauty amidst those societal restraints, like watching a boy and a girl sprint down a dirt road at night, illuminated only by the moon. Filled with dark humor and the restless anxieties of youth, perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the film is the literally intoxicating, perfectly-in-sync song motif by contemporary Swedish singer-songwriter Anna von Hausswolff, known for her Gothic style, usually accompanied by the pipe organ, Anna Von Hausswolff - Stranger - 2015 YouTube (5:20), initially heard by Lenka accompanied by her neighbor Kaya (Ninel Geiger) listening through headphones, later internalizing thoughts in a drawn-out dream sequence, as if coming from the deep recesses of their subconscious, while also heard again over the closing credits. This eerie, lovestruck ballad, reflecting the longing for tenderness, is used to mirror the film’s themes of out-of-body emotional conflict and memory, with lyrics noting, “There is something moving against me.” Angelika contemplates seeing the world upside down, SOUND OF FALLING - EXCLUSIVE CLIP YouTube (1:50), while Lenka remembers the gaze of her parents’ male friend leering at her when she took off her T-shirt while splashing in the garden with the smaller children in the heat. “Why is it that you blush on the head so that everyone sees your own shame when you are trying to hide it, and why are our bodies constituted to make this visible to everyone?” In the end, two figures rise in succession during a huge storm, as they float above the ground in a moment of bizarre beauty in the midst of the chaos swirling all around them, above all the burdens and worries. Profound and deeply thoughtful, with so much open to interpretation, Schilinski has crafted a somber, poetic, and skilled chronicle of immense power that reverberates beyond its volatile confines, possessing the elegance of a poem and the emotional complexity of a great novel.
