Film Review: Mascha Schilinski Puts Us in Death’s Eyes with ‘Sound of Falling’

The experience of watching Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling can only be described as otherworldly and dread-inducing. The German filmmaker’s second feature puts us in the middle of a floating camera that consistently shifts through four time periods, in a non-linear fashion. It examines four generations of women – Alma (Hanna Heckt), Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) – who carry some part of themselves in each time period depicted in the film: the 1910s, 1940s, 1980s, and 2020s. The women all lived on the same farmstead and shared many of the same traumas they had endured across generations.

It’s a dense, often alienating, piece of work that certainly won’t impress anyone looking for a more conventional time at the movies, and its structure is certainly one that few will get accustomed to by the time Schilinski stretches her 154-minute runtime and consistently repeats the same gestures over each of the time periods she depicts in her decade-spanning drama. In that regard, Schilinski’s proposal is initially alluring. Instead of a camera that examines the characters at a distance and finds unique threads that link their individual stories together, cinematographer Fabian Gamper’s lens almost puts us in Death’s eyes, as if a ghost observes each of the women navigating their tumultuous lives. 

I’ve never felt such dread watching a camera float through time like this, but there was something about the film’s atmosphere that I genuinely couldn’t shake off, even when it ultimately began to lose me. Schilinski’s mastery of atmosphere is second-to-none, consistently blurring the line between the harsh reality the women live and the otherworldly presence they may carry through time. The entire film seems to be told by unreliable narrators who put the audience in a position they desperately want to escape. Simply put, Sound of Falling is an uncomfortable, confronting watch that only grows more so as the film progresses, and its thematic threads are clarified by its devastating, heart-wrenching conclusion.

But it’s also shockingly distant, which makes our emotional attachment (or involvement) to the story seem limited, despite an experimental structure that encourages our attention until the end. A film like this requires some form of intimacy between the audience and characters, even during difficult-to-watch scenes. However, Schilinski’s approach dismantles everything we think we know about dramas set across multiple time periods and offers something truly distinct and singular, laudable for its ambition, even if its execution falls short of the filmmaker’s vision. 

It’s a difficult object to describe, because the effect one has in watching Sound of Falling is so visceral that it might just make you ill once it reaches its end credits, knowing the extent of what the women carry throughout generations. However, one might also perceive that the project feels incomplete, despite the technical mastery on display and the staggering performances of its impressive ensemble. As much as I was pulled into Sound of Falling’s formal (and structural) daring, most of my appreciation of the film seemed limited, considering how much I found its approach to trauma difficult and overwrought, even if the nagging feeling of death consistently staring at you in the face can’t be ignored.

Death always stares at us in the face, whether we want to or not, but no one actively knows what will happen when we move on – or when we’re at death’s door. Sound of Falling visualizes a possibility of what might happen when we’re gone in ways that will crawl under your skin. It puts us in the shoes of a spectre who lingers through time and conveys the pain it carries to the women we meet in each decade. In that case, Schilinski has more than succeeded in giving her film an atmosphere that’s hard to shake off, but the overall experience was tainted by a structure that always felt at odds with how their characters evolved inside its non-linear setting.

It results in an admirable – but ultimately forgettable – effort whose atmosphere sticks with you, but its micro-details slip past your psyche much faster than you’d think. That said, there’s no denying that Schilinski’s future as a filmmaker, in the wake of her Jury Prize win at Cannes, is more than promising. All eyes will be on whatever awaits her next, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it. What she puts forward in Sound of Falling is singular enough to at least warrant our attention, even if the end result might ultimately disappoint. However, when her next effort ultimately releases, the perceived flaws in this effort may no longer matter anymore…

SCORE: ★★1/2