Sound Of Falling film review: Hauntingly beautiful
A tale of death, cruelty and bad luck set on the same farm across four generations
Winner of last year’s Cannes Jury Prize, Sound Of Falling is the stunning sophomore film from German writer-director Mascha Schilinski. Her first, Dark Blue Girl, was made as a student, starred breakout star Helena Zengel and was nominated for best first feature at the 2017 Berlinale. Set in the Altmark region of Germany, Schilinski’s follow-up introduces us to four generations of girls, raised on the same farm over the course of more than a century.
It’s a film that highlights the grim hand the female sex have been dealt historically, the role social status plays, and the possible transmission of trauma. Sound Of Falling resists a conventional narrative structure, snaking back and forth through time with an almost spectral-like subtlety and unfolding in a way that somehow feels natural. Memories and bodily experiences become collective, with stories overlapping, echoing and merging as if they’re bleeding into one another.
In the 1910s we meet seven-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt), one of many siblings being raised in an austere setting shrouded in death, cruelty and misfortune. We witness the passing of several family members, the abuse of maid Trudi (Luzia Oppermann) and the injuries inflicted on Alma’s brother Fritz and sister Lia (Filip Schnack and Greta Krämer), much of it viewed as if through Alma’s own eyes. And yet we also see moments of childish joy, that act like shafts of light in the gloom, as the siblings play pranks and share expressions of affection.
We find an older Fritz (now played by Martin Rother) bedbound in the 1940s, where he’s become a source of fascination for his teenage niece Erika (Lea Drinda) who develops an unhealthy interest in his amputated leg. Later, in a section set in the 1980s, Erika’s grown-up sister Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading) has to contend with a rebellious teenager of her own, her daughter Angelika (Lena Urzendowksy), who we see engaging in inappropriate flirtations with her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst), as well as her cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann).
Things are brought up to date in 2020s-set scenes which follow Angelika’s daughter Christa (Luise Heyer) who is renovating the old family farm after moving there from the city. We see her daughter Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) befriend a more confident village girl Kaya (Ninel Geiger) whose mother has recently died, and who looks to Christa for comfort. Although the set-up feels less fraught, the family’s own tragedy lurks just around the corner.
Working with a tight budget which only allowed for 34 days of shooting, Schilinski has moved mountains. The director and her co-writer Louise Peter were inspired to write the film after spending a summer in the Altmark region, halfway between Berlin and Hamburg, near the Elbe River. They discovered a farm, which had stood empty for 50 years, and came across a photo of three women from 1920 staring straight at the camera, becoming curious about their stories. Schilinski felt one of the keys to success was finding faces to suit the relevant time periods and the team held open castings in which they saw around 1400 girls over the course of a year, with the eventual, significantly-sized ensemble a seamless blend of first-timers and established actors.
Despite the tumultuous time periods in which the girls are living, the stories presented are distinctly feminine and intimate; although somewhat shielded from external horrors, they have little protection from more personal ones. If the grim subject matter will undoubtedly be a challenge for many, what could have been a punishing watch is rendered hauntingly beautiful by Schilinski and her cinematographer husband Fabian Gamper, taking inspiration from the work of US photographer Francesca Woodman, who died by suicide aged just 22, and has become known for her black-and-white portraits.
Although it’s an inarguably sad collection of stories, as tragedy touches every generation of this family and the girls’ fates feel inescapable, Sound Of Falling occasionally lacks the expected emotion, wrapped, as it is, in a dreamlike, frequently wordless haze that feels akin to the way we experience memories. Nevertheless, the skill of Schilinski’s execution is sublime, with the film’s visual poetry, flow and the daringness of her direction marking her out as a vital new cinematic voice.
Sound Of Falling screens at GFT, Friday 27 February, as part of Glasgow Film Festival; in cinemas from Friday 6 March.