Sound of Falling
begins with a young girl named Angelika on crutches, one leg seemingly missing as she struggles to walk. Eventually, she’s called by her father and we see her lift up her skirt to untie her missing leg, folding it down against the creaky wooden floors so she can stand on two feet again. Angelika’s experiment, inspired by her Uncle Fritz, who is actually missing a leg, belies an obsession both with the pain that is in the foundation of their German farmhouse and Fritz himself.
It’s the first of many striking sequences in director Masha Schilinski’s sophomore feature, a confounding and captivating film that tracks four generations of girls living in the same farmhouse. In kaleidoscopic fashion, Schilinski pulls together the stories of these four girls and their families in different eras of German history, examining how the events of the past have a way of lingering and that, when looked at all at once, time folds back in on itself until you no longer know what came first or when.
Sound Of Falling Is A Challenging Film
It Begs For Repeat Viewings & Its Complex Structure Can Be Isolating
If that sounds both confusing and captivating, that’s because it is. Sound of Falling’s cinematic language, while wholly original, left me feeling unmoored, clearly the intention of the story but done so in a way that disorients as much as it stuns. There’s not so much one singular story here, but rather patterns and motifs that come together in painfully haunting ways.
The youngest of our batch of protagonists is Alma (Hanna Heckt), a strikingly blonde little girl who observes everyone in her family with the keen eyes of someone seeing too much too soon. The large brood that lives on the sprawling farm keeps many secrets — the reason Fritz lost his leg, their mother’s mysterious illness, the strange death of an older sister. These events are seen not with clarity but through an opaque, childlike perspective.
This opacity doesn’t preclude Alma from missing out on the violence of her era, nor does it save the other girls — Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) — from their own forms of harm, self-inflicted or doled out by the men in their families. On the cusp of maturity — whether by age or by circumstance — these girls are shaped by what happens to them and around them.
It’s a harsh and challenging way of life that’s depicted, but it isn’t isolating for those reasons. Rather, the isolation comes from the narrative time-jumping, which can make certain events, people, or even images hard to keep track of. Once we get a grasp of who is who and when is when, Sound of Falling allows itself to flow freely between time periods and memories. If you can’t get your footing early on in the film, some of its subtler moments are lost in the shuffle.
It’s not hard to see that Schilinski is operating on a wavelength that should launch her into a new phase of her burgeoning career.
I imagine that Sound of Falling will reward repeat viewings. There’s almost too much to take in upon first glance, decades of life condensed into two and a half hours. Schilinski’s vision is so confident and so bracing that it’s hard not to be arrested by what’s happening onscreen, even if you’re not sure what’s going on.
The director frames many sH๏τs as glimpses through keyholes, cracked doors, and from below window sills, as if, like the girls on the farm, we are witnessing things not meant to be seen. It gives the film a foreboding atmosphere, especially when the implicit becomes explicit.
Ultimately, Sound of Falling is about the violence that society inflicts upon these young girls by the people who are supposed to care for them — an entrusted neighbor, a predatory uncle, a young cousin. It’s never macabre and though it’s hard to fully grasp in one viewing, it’s not hard to see that Schilinski is operating on a wavelength that should launch her into a new phase of her burgeoning career.
Sound of Falling premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
