‘Sound Of Falling’ review: Trauma seeps through a century of women’s lives in rural Germany

Dir: Mascha Schilinski. Germany. 2025. 148mins

At instances it appears as if tragedy has seeped into the very partitions of the sprawling farmhouse in Germany’s Altmark area the place this story unfolds, solely to leach out and pollute the happiness of every subsequent technology. At others, it feels as if the a long time that separate the lives of the 4 ladies who’re the movie’s focus are fluid, and that the barrier of time is by some means permeable. What’s sure is that Sound Of Falling, the hanging second function from German director Mascha Schilinski, is a piece of thrilling ambition realised by an assured directorial imaginative and prescient. 

Publicizes Schilinski as a expertise of appreciable be aware

Schilinski is one thing of a darkish horse contender on this 12 months’s Cannes Competitors. Her 2017 debut, Darkish Blue Lady, premiered at Berlin and picked up a handful of prizes at smaller, specialist occasions. She has since directed episodes of German tv sequence Cologne PD. Sound of Falling is prone to increase Schilinski’s profile, saying her as a expertise of be aware. The movie is slated for launch in Germany in September and will generate curiosity amongst arthouse distributors and streaming platforms in different territories.

The unfold of the intertwined, patchworked tales extends over roughly a century, with the earliest happening inside a farming household getting ready themselves, with a surprising finality, for the outbreak of the First World Battle. Demise looms giant over the youngsters of this austere neighborhood; an All Souls Day ritual pays tribute to their many deceased siblings and different family, all commemorated with morbid group pictures during which the our bodies are dressed of their finery and propped up on a settee.

Alma (Hanna Heckt), the elfin, flaxen-haired protagonist of this part, turns into troubled by one image, displaying her pinched, mute mom posing with the inert physique of a kid who’s the spitting picture of her. Her older sisters tease her – the lifeless lady within the photograph is Alma, they are saying, seeding a preoccupation together with her personal mortality. In a single extraordinary sequence, the sisters play a trick on a housemaid, nailing her indoor clogs to the ground. The great-natured maid leaps up and chases the squealing and scattering youngsters by way of the mossy gloom of the home. There’s a tumult of pleasure – then simply as instantly, a quiet falls, and Alma finds herself alone within the vacancy like somewhat ghost.

In one other time,  years later, teenage Erika (Lea Drinda) neglects her pig-tending duties due to her fascination together with her amputee uncle, Alma’s older brother. Later, within the Eighties, Erika’s niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) finds herself the main target of the unwelcome attentions of her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and his gauche son Rainer (Florian Geißelmann). And within the remaining, up to date story, the clan’s connection to the farm has been severed, and newcomers, a household with two daughters, have purchased it to renovate. However the stain of unhappiness on the constructing is difficult to shift. The informal horrors endured by the ladies of the sooner generations – dairy maids are ‘made protected’ for the lads by an operation to render them infertile – are the sort of traumas that may depart a mark for many years to return.

Schilinski threads collectively the totally different timelines with recurring themes and pictures. The trickle of sweat caught in a stomach button; the innocuous terrors of the hayloft; the loaded significance of group pictures; the ominous pull of the close by River Elbe which, for a few of the tales at the least, marks the border between East and West Germany.

Water additionally figures prominently within the soundscape, constructing to a roaring crescendo that bursts by way of the image like a wave of dread. It’s a piece of hanging magnificence – the subdued velvety mild of the farmhouse interiors is a backdrop towards which the youngsters glow like pearls; the healthful golds and fecund greens of the arable fields counsel a land bursting with life, and shadowed by demise.