‘Sound of Falling’ Review: A Visceral Journey Through Generations of Women

Mysterious, elusive, nightmarish, Sound of Falling plays like an elegiac poem, a song for the dead: a journey across a century in the life of a German family haunted by dark, unsettling, and often uncanny stories, most of them carried by women. From its very first frame, Mascha Schilinski builds an entire world. Her restless camera floats above the village where everyone lives—and, more importantly, where everyone dies. Moving back and forth through time across what appear to be four distinct periods, from the early 20th century to the present day, all set in the same house and the same village in what was once East Germany, Schilinski constructs a beautiful and deeply unsettling visual poem. Creepy, immersive, and fragmentary, the film unfolds as a series of vignettes or anecdotes charged with brutal, lingering memories.

With sparse dialogue and a dense weave of voiceovers spoken by different characters over its 150-minute running time, Sound of Falling constantly shifts from one moment to another, deliberately blurring chronology to heighten a pervasive sense of calamity. A young man loses a leg. A girl drowns. Another throws herself from the top of a hayloft. One climbs a tree and cannot come down. There is a corpse covered in flies; another body has its eyes sewn shut to conceal the damage; a woman who seems to exist halfway between life and ghosthood. The dead come and go. Wars sweep through. Romances flicker briefly. Sexual desires are suggested, forbidden, distorted. Time advances, and its consequences accumulate like scars.

In her second feature, Schilinski never lets her camera rest. It is in constant motion, evoking the most ominous version imaginable of Terrence Malick. She shifts film formats depending on the era and the point of view, embracing a kind of visual acrobatics that can, at times, feel deliberately exhausting. What she creates is less a conventionally legible narrative than a sustained mood, an oppressive atmosphere that prioritizes sensation over clarity.

A blonde, wide-eyed girl named Alma seems to inhabit the earliest time period. Erika, living in the 1940s, introduces us to the trauma and moral suffocation of one of the most devastating chapters in German history. In the 1970s and ’80s, already within the borders of the German Democratic Republic, Angelika navigates tense, disturbing sexual situations involving a cousin and an uncle. In the present day, Lenka meets a girl she appears to fall in love with—someone who has the unsettling habit of disappearing.

The film advances in a way that feels as literary as it is cinematic. One can easily imagine Schilinski reading family memoirs from Germany’s past and inventing images to accompany the emotions those texts evoke. Largely uninterested in traditional cause-and-effect logic, the film allows certain narrative threads to briefly take hold, only to abandon them in favor of others, set in different eras and emotional registers.

At times, Sound of Falling flirts with becoming a prolonged, nightmarish music video—something Nick Cave might have commissioned—peppered with Lynchian moments (including a recurring musical motif), echoes of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, and an overarching “greatest hits” sensibility of art-cinema imagery that, very much in the Malick tradition, is constantly deconstructed and rebuilt.

Visually striking and dramatically perverse, Sound of Falling feels as though it is being narrated by ghosts hovering above the village, spying through keyholes and cracks in the walls. There are fleeting moments of candor and tenderness, but they are ultimately swallowed by a funereal, suffocating, end-of-the-line atmosphere. Its protagonists—girls, adolescents, women; men occupy only a marginal space here—experience pleasure, play, and moments of reverie, yet seem condemned to the strangest deaths, to mysterious disappearances, to being lifted into the air and bound to one another in a realm that exists somewhere beyond the earthly and the explainable.