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An ominous droning rush swarms the soundtrack at several points in “Sound of Falling,” like the growing momentum of weight meeting gravity, and it’s presumably this recurring aural motif that gives Mascha Schilinski‘s exquisite sophomore feature its otherwise vague English-language title. It bears no relation to the film’s original German appellation, which translates even less meaningfully as “Staring Into the Sun,” and if it seems this was a hard work to title altogether, that’s because it trades in feelings and experiences at once everyday and ineffable.
Intricately braiding the lives of four generations of girls, living (if they’re not dying) through different eras on the same forbidding farmstead in northern Germany, Schilinski has constructed a haunted-house story of unique and devastating proportions, essaying a litany of historical cruelties visited on women throughout the 20th century, up to a present day in which much has changed but the song remains the same. Formally rigorous but not austere, shot through with dark humor and quivering sensual intensity, “Sound of Falling” marks a substantial step up in ambition and execution from Schilinski’s promising but comparatively modest 2017 debut “Dark Blue Girl,” and with an unexpected but fully earned slot in the main competition at Cannes, vaults the 41-year-old Berliner immediately to the forefront of contemporary German cinema.
Commercially, deft handling by discerning arthouse distributors will be required to draw audiences to a knotty, novelistic work that is, in the most rewarding possible way, difficult to package or summarize. Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter’s sinuous original screenplay comprises four narrative strands, each already rife with its own enigmas, ambiguities and floating shifts in perspective; woven together in largely impressionistic order, they begin to reflect and resemble each other in complex, telling ways. Collectively they form a hydra-headed evocation of young womanhood in which the past does little to prepare each successive generation for bruising first encounters with desire, abuse and mortality — and where, in a world still ruled by violent patriarchy, what doesn’t kill you makes you more cautious.
It begins with a fragment from the sparsest of the four, a snapshot of pitiless rural routine that directly colors the stories preceding it and succeeding it chronologically. Red-headed teenager Erika (Lea Drinda) is introduced hobbling down a dark farmhouse corridor on one leg, supported by crutches, as her father boorishly calls outside for her to come and tend to the pigs.
But she’s merely play-acting: Her left leg is tied up under her dress, and the crutches belong not to her but her bed-ridden amputee uncle Fritz (Martin Rother). When she drops the ruse and goes to her father, he strikes her brutally in the face; small wonder she entertains private fantasies of disability. Her reaction to the blow is a small, rueful smile, directed straight at DP Fabian Gamper’s hovering, ambiguously positioned camera — not the first time one of Schilinski’s female protagonists will silently break the fourth wall, inviting the audience’s gaze in an environment that otherwise grants them little care or scrutiny.
Living in the 1940s under the close shadow of the Second World War, Erika is a descendant of Alma (nine-year-old Hanna Heckt, remarkable in her big-screen debut), the inquisitive, flaxen-haired youngest daughter of a stern farming family at the turn of the century. Alma, too, is given to mischief and whimsy, qualities in desperately short supply in a household mostly characterized by physical and psychic anguish. Through her eyes, we learn the savage truth of how the young, once-strapping Fritz (Filip Schnack) lost his leg, and probe behind the mournful demeanor of stricken, old-before-her-time domestic servant Trudi (Luzia Oppermann) — one of many maids forcibly sterilized by her employers, “to be made safe for the men.” Though she only understands some of what she witnesses through keyholes or coy adult allusion, Alma’s innocence darkens over the course of the summer, by the end of which she herself expects to die.
In the other direction, the family tree extends to Erika’s sister Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), introduced in the early 1980s as mother to restless teen Angelika (a superb Lena Urzendowsky), whose growing sexual awakening is exploited by her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and more tenderly pursued by her gawky cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann). The latter is the only male character to contribute to a running voiceover that otherwise alternates between the female principals, sometimes looking back on their youth with some distance, and a more omniscient narrator. In the present day, the farm is a summer home for a middle-class Berlin couple and their daughters Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) and Nelly (Zoë Baier) — seemingly unrelated to the previous residents, though in time, the house’s history of tragedy and feminine anxiety appears to intrude on them too.
Shooting in a suitably confined Academy ratio, Schilinski and Gamper visually unite the film’s switching eras with grainily textured compositions that evoke faded family photos in some shots and antique mirror oxidation in others — all in a palette of dulled blacks and tea-stained browns only sporadically leavened by a breath of stonewashed blue. This distressed imagery provides an apt aesthetic counterpart to storytelling in which each scene is presented as a subjective memory, with some details blurred and others pin-sharp. The camera is watchful but sometimes hesitantly positioned, as if trying to recall the layout of a part-forgotten scene.
Sonically, too, “Sound of Falling” sews its timelines together with patterned bursts of static and silence — and one repeated needle-drop in “Stranger,” a woozy, warily lovestruck ballad by contemporary singer-songwriter Anna von Hausswolff, with its own expression of out-of-body emotional conflict. (“There is something moving against me,” she sings. “It’s not in line with the world I know.”) No finer point of craft, performance or poetic nuance has been rushed or neglected in a film that ultimately sounds a warning against the dimming or blunting or de-specification of memory — not just for oneself, but for communities or lineages with more shared stories than they might think, but an inclination to clam up and carry on. If these walls could talk, this startling film concludes, they’d probably stay silent.
English (US) ·