SOUND OF FALLING

Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

SOUND OF FALLING is a movie of tremendous daring, real cinema, mystery, pain, psychology.

Four young to adolescent German girls in four different time periods (1910s, 1940s, 1980s, 2020s) experience great sorrows, mysteries, vicissitudes of coming of age life on the same German farm.

We see the history of Germany in the background. The farm is just within East Germany from the end of WWII to the reunification and a river marks the division.

Filmmaker Mascha Schilinski crafts a work of vitality and experimentation. It's always reinvigorating to see a movie do something new with sound, image, editing, storytelling.

These are the movies we need to nourish the fields of film. To inspire the young to make movies.

At the same time, SOUND OF FALLING is not an unqualified masterpiece. This writer, at least, had some problems with the last twenty minutes or so of the picture which felt almost too unbearably fetishistically bleak. As if the filmmaker was reverse engineering the surprising fates of the women to both forced unpredictability and too predictable disaster.

The very final scene is a stunner that seems to want to, yet again, veer in a direction you don't see coming. In some ways, Schilinski seems determined NOT to make the movie you want but a movie that needs to be what it is.

All of that is admirable. And Schilinski and her collaborators succeed WAY MORE in this movie than they falter.

The ending was a frustration for this writer because up until those final 20 minutes or so, Schilinski demonstrated an amazing ability to take you right to the edge, even over the edge, of what is bearable, and then pull you back in very clever ways.

Often you realize what you have just seen is a momentary fantasy or daydream, NOT reality. And this allows you, as the audience, to say, okay, I can keep going here. This makes sense. There's joy and sorrow.

In fact, ambiguity of reality and fantasy, what has happened and what might be in the minds of the different narrators, is the core of the movie.

While Schilinski answers some questions quite well, allowing us to add two plus two without spelling it out, other questions are so obliquely addressed or unresolved, we're left with some confusion.

Did certain characters die or not? Was some of the horrific treatment of daughters, female farm servants, etc common practice in rural Germany?!

Certain characters reappear or link the succeeding sequences. And the farm itself acts as a kind of huge charged, haunted, traumatic space. So much so that by the time we realize things might also go south in the 2020's storyline, we want to yell at the women to get out of there. The damn place is just cursed.

Schilinski is dealing with a lot here. And SOUND OF FALLING, which won the 2025 Jury Prize at Cannes, ambitiously touches on death, war, abuse, rape, trauma, female relationships, sexuality, inner imaginative life, alienation, isolation.

The most stunning aspect of the movie is its style. And this may be its greatest success, at least to this writer. The experimentation with sound design, different film images creates a unique grammar that reminds one of the TRULY best cinema.

A language of female psychology is created. And it's exhilarating.

Every few years a movie comes out that excites with the possibilities the form still has. Richard Linklater's 2014 BOYHOOD, George Miller's 2015 FURY ROAD, 2018's INTO THE SPIDERVERSE, Joachim Trier's 2021 THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, all felt like acupuncture needles in the filmic body, clearing the way so the CHI could flow forward.

SOUND OF FALLING is in that group of movies. Despite its very real frustrations.

This is a brutal and trying film. It's also a beautiful and experimental one.

It doesn't completely work. And might ultimately be a bit too much. And a bit too confusing.

But it captures and communicates and creates something unique and bold and powerful.

And that's reason to celebrate.

Craig Hammill is the founder/programmer of Secret Movie Club.