THE STORY – Over the course of a century, four girls spend their youth on the same four-sided farmstead in the Altmark region. As they move through their respective presents, traces of the past gradually emerge.
THE CAST -Lea Drinda, Laeni Geiseler, Hanna Heckt & Lena Urzendowsky
THE TEAM -Mascha Schilinski (Director/Writer) & Louise Peter (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 149 Minutes
Deep in the heart of Germany’s Altmark region, there lies a farmhouse. In this farmhouse, families have lived, loved, and lost over the past hundred years. In Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling,” we meet them all, experiencing their lives alongside them in a kaleidoscopic examination of female coming-of-age from the turn of the twentieth century onwards. A sprawling family epic that mixes the intimate with the grandiose to stunning effect, “Sound of Falling” announces Schilinski as a major new voice in world cinema, opening the Competition of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in grand fashion.
When looking back at the history of the early twentieth century, it’s surprising how much we don’t know about women’s lives. So much that happened was never written down at all, let alone in a way that makes sense to modern sensibilities. There were certain things that were simply not talked about, not even in the privacy of one’s own diary, in part because people didn’t have the language to properly express what they were feeling and in part because shame is an incredibly powerful motivator. Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter examine womanhood in the past century from every angle, finding surprising connections between characters separated by decades. While the characters in each time period don’t talk to characters from other time periods in a literal sense, their experiences speak to each other, reverberating throughout the years, echoing back and forth in time through the walls of the house. It’s a thrilling conceit that could easily become a sprawling mess, but Schilinski proves herself equal to the task, guiding the audience through the myriad rooms of this hazy memory palace of a film seemingly by intuition. At first, shifts in time are preceded by a rush of sound, usually accompanied by a long push-in on a character in a moment of heightened awareness, but as the film goes on and the characters become more familiar, this doesn’t always happen. Schilinski puts in the work early on to ensure that when she starts playing with time more directly, the audience will always know where and when they are. It’s difficult at first since there are so many characters to keep track of, and if you’re not paying close attention, you could get the two earliest time periods confused with each other. But by the film’s halfway point, everything is clear.
There’s no time traveling taking place here, but there are moments when characters feel out of place in time, something Schilinski emphasizes by playing with sound throughout the film. There comes a moment in each time period where the sound cuts out completely for several moments, slowly fading back in after the character in question has been thoroughly shaken by suddenly finding themselves alone, their inner feelings manifested in the world around them in the most harrowing way possible. That isn’t the only thing (other than familial bloodlines) that connects them, though. Obsessions with corporeality and death also manifest in each timeline. More than one of the girls fantasizes about their own death in morbid ways, with their voiceovers making pointed statements about feeling like they’re living their life in vain and how you never know when you’re at your happiest. Similar impulses compel WWII-era Erika (Lea Drinda) to tie up her leg so that she can’t walk on it while trying out her uncle’s crutches, as compel turn-of-the-century Alma (Hanna Heckt, absolutely born for the screen) to pose in the same position as her namesake ancestor in a haunting postmortem daguerreotype portrait. The girls want to know how it feels to be in somebody else’s body, to experience what they’re unable to because of their age, station, or sex. Perhaps they’re trying to connect with each other physically across time, as well as emotionally. That may be why ’80s teenager Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) alternately pursues and pushes away both her cousin and her uncle, while present-day Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) can’t seem to make up her mind about her feelings towards her new neighbor Kaya (Ninel Geiger).
All this sounds unbearably heavy and a tiny bit pretentious, but “Sound of Falling” is completely entrancing to watch. Whether or not you fully understand everything Schilinski is doing, the film’s glowingly gorgeous cinematography and often thrilling use of sound fully immerse you in these girls’ worlds. Cinematographer Fabian Gamper’s camera takes inspiration from a line about secretly watching others watch you to create a visual aesthetic that puts you inside the characters’ headspace and outside of it simultaneously, giving the film the feeling of a waking dream or a living memory. The film also has a sneaky sense of humor (all the girls love pulling pranks) that cuts through Schilinski’s more high-minded ambitions in a delightful way.
At every turn, “Sound of Falling” stuns. Schilinski’s control over the film’s aesthetics extends to the cast, as every member of the sprawling ensemble feels like they’re part of the same family. The individual performers are all great, but they really shine as an ensemble, with each member a single square of the quilt Schilinski is stitching together. This is no mere patchwork but a layered, adventurous piece of art that takes a lot of beautiful small pieces and puts them together to create something monumental. By taking undertold stories from the past century and filtering them through Schilinski’s present-day point of view, she has created a film that will stand the test of time just like her farmhouse setting does, forever creating a dialogue between the past, present, and future that illuminates them all.
