19-05-2025
‘Sound of Falling' Review: A Haunting Meditation on Womanhood and Rural Strife That Heralds the Arrival of a Bold New Talent
It's not every day you see a movie that resembles nothing you've quite seen before, making you question the very notion of what a movie can be. And yet German director Mascha Schilinski's bold second feature, Sound of Falling (In Die Sonne Schauen), is just that: a transfixing chronicle in which the lives of four girls are fused into one long cinematic tone poem, hopping between different epochs without warning, painting a portrait of budding womanhood and rural strife through the ages.
The closest thing that comes to mind is probably Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, although this is Malick by way of Jane Campion and Michael Haneke, shifting between fleeting coming-of-age moments and scenes of resolute darkness and human cruelty. At two and a half hours, and without an easily discernible narrative throughline, Sound of Falling is arthouse filmmaking with a capital A that will best appeal to patient audiences. They will be rewarded by a work that reminds us how the cinema can still reinvent itself, as long as there are directors like Schilinski audacious enough to try.
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Co-written with Louise Peter, the movie's collage-like structure tells four simultaneous stories though a series of fragments or snaphots (cameras of all types are depicted and used on screen), spanning a timeframe from the early 20th century all the way to the present. Set in the same massive farmhouse that passes down from one family to another, the film never strays too far from its main location, venturing out to wander the nearby fields or dip into a picturesque river separating East and West Germany.
Characters come and go over the years, as cinematographer Fabian Gamper (shooting in the box-like 1:1.37 format) creeps around the house like a ghost discreetly recording events as they happen, catching moments of torment and flashes of occasional humor. Scenes become memories in other scenes, passed on from the living to the dead and back again, cut together by editor Evelyn Rack so that they resonate more as time goes by.
The effect can be disorienting at first, and Sound of Falling is a film whose power slowly accumulates as it progresses. The quartet of girls we follow — Alma (Hanna Heckt) after the turn of the last century, Erika (Lea Drinda) after WWII, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the GDR of the 1980s and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the present — are not all related, though they share a common history that hangs over the house as both a blessing and a curse.
There is trauma in their lives — sometimes deep unforgettable trauma that never seems to leave the Altmark region where their farm is located. But there is also beauty and self-discovery. Schilinski has essentially made four bildungsroman movies at once, each of them about young women awakening to the possibilities, as well as to the limits, that life has to offer them.
The scenes involving Alma and Erika, both of whom grow up in worlds dominated by a solemn patriarchy and plagued by hardship, feel like they were drawn from period horror movies.
The pale blonde Alma is obsessed by a dead sibling whose portrait rests on a mantle honoring the family dead. In the picture, the girl's corpse is propped up on a sofa alongside some of her favorite toys, in a style of post-mortem photography popular at the time. Decades later, Erika bears a carnal attraction to her Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), an amputee who lies withering in pain in his bedroom. Much later we learn how he lost his leg as a teenager, in a startling scene of parental savagery.
At first blush, the stories of Angelika and Lenka seem altogether more pleasant, revealing how life in their agricultural community did grow somewhat easier over time. This doesn't mean the girls don't have their own demons to face, whether it's Angelika's burgeoning sexuality and disturbing relationship with her uncle (Konstantin Lindhorst), or the melancholic Lenka's friendship with a neighboring girl (Zoë Baier) trying to get over the death of her mother.
Schilinski finds powerful visual hooks to connect the characters across the decades. They make the same gestures, witness the same things — many scenes are shot from their POVs, through windows, doorways and keyholes — and sometimes live out parallel stories, as if their bodies were marked by the wounds and revelations of earlier times. With its epic scope and precisely drawn figures in the countryside, the film has the weight of a hefty 19th century agrarian novel. But it's told as a pure work of stream of consciousness, as if Virginia Woolf had decided to rewrite a book by Thomas Hardy.
This could prove frustrating for viewers looking to latch on to a single plotline, or even multiple plotlines that merge together seamlessly as an ensemble piece. Sound of Falling (whose German title translates to Looking into the Sun) offers up an altogether different kind of storytelling, made up of momentary sensations, images, emotions and sounds that gradually form a bigger picture.
That picture depicts a world where young women face untold obstacles from one epoch to another, including rape, the death of loved ones, forced sterilization, incest, and a form of rural slavery and prostitution, yet eventually emerge as arbiters of their own fates. Schilinski doesn't spare us all their pain and suffering, nor does she hide the joy and wonder they sometimes experience. Her brave girls carry their forebearers within them from one generation to the next, surging toward the future both damaged and victorious.
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