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Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling is the ambitious second feature from the German director, which premiered to acclaim at Cannes (where it took a Jury Prize) and serves as Germany’s Oscar submission. It weaves together the lives of four young girls across roughly a century in the same remote Altmark farmhouse. What emerges is less a straightforward narrative than a sensory, emotional collage of trauma, memory, desire, and the inescapable weight of history.
The film shifts between four distinct periods—pre-World War I, the end of World War II, the 1980s, and the present day. Each era focuses on a girl navigating the confined, changing spaces of the family farm: Alma in the early 20th century, secretly observing forbidden moments through keyholes; alongside her, characters like Angelika, Erika, and those in later times face their own struggles with loneliness, abuse, patriarchal dominance, and subtle acts of defiance. The echoes of past pain ripple through generations, creating a haunting, disorienting sense of connectedness that is both unsettling and profoundly moving.
Performances from the young leads (including Hanna Heckt as Alma and Lena Urzendowsky) are remarkable. They convey the raw curiosity and confusion of girlhood without ever feeling exploitative, even as the script confronts heavy themes like violence against women, incestuous undertones, suicide, and the lingering shadows of war and national guilt. The film is unflinching yet never gratuitous; its impact derives from subtle suggestion, recurring motifs, and the gradual buildup of emotional weight.
At nearly 2.5 hours, Sound of Falling demands patience. The story is told in a non-linear way, using short scenes that can feel confusing at first. The constant sadness might also be hard to watch for some people. But if you go along with its pace, you’ll find it very powerful—a reflection on how the past doesn’t disappear but stays with us in our bodies, decisions, and surroundings. Schilinski shows herself to be a talented filmmaker here, creating a work that is carefully made, full of sensory details, and explores big ideas.
In a cinematic landscape often dominated by spectacle, this is quiet, brutal, and philosophical filmmaking at its finest. Sound of Falling left me emotionally depleted but intellectually electrified, pondering my own family’s unseen legacies. It’s a masterpiece of intergenerational haunting—one that proves the ghosts of girlhood past are never truly gone.
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