Editor’s Be aware: This evaluation was initially printed in the course of the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. MUBI releases “Sound of Falling” in choose theaters beginning Friday, January 16, 2026.
Unfolding like 100 years of house video footage that had been shot by the household ghosts, Mascha Schilinski’s wealthy and mesmeric “Sound of Falling” glimpses 4 era of younger ladies as they dwell, die, and suffuse their reminiscences into the partitions of a rural farmhouse within the north German area of Altmark.
Within the Nineteen Forties, after among the native boys are maimed by their dad and mom to be able to keep away from combating Hitler’s battle, teenage Erika (Lea Drinda) hobbles by the halls with certainly one of her tied legs up in string, desperate to know what shedding a limb would possibly really feel like. Unbeknownst to her, cherubic little Alma (Hanna Heckt) expressed an identical curiosity some 30 years earlier when she performed lifeless on the parlor room sofa, posing in the identical place that her late grandmother’s corpse had been positioned for a autopsy daugerreotype.
And but, coming of age within the German Democratic Republic of the Nineteen Eighties, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) would possibly assume she’s inventing her girlish impulse in the direction of self-negation when she fantasizes about mendacity down in entrance of her father’s tank-sized land imprinter because it mulches her physique into the earth, simply as Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) — dwelling in our current — wonders if she’s the primary particular person to be checked out in a manner that burns below her pores and skin. We not often see these characters overlap in a literal sense, and their particular relationships to at least one one other stay arduous to outline (it might take an expert arborist to untangle the roots of this film’s household tree, no less than on first watch), however “Sound of Falling” is deeply attuned to the echoes between them.
Someway each hyper-subjective and hauntingly disembodied unexpectedly, Schilinski’s recursive second characteristic floats by the a long time like an errant thought hoping to seek out somebody who would possibly acknowledge it as certainly one of their very own. The movie lopes forwards and backwards in time with out discover or warning, Fabian Gamper’s digital camera usually peering by keyholes and floorboards to be able to reconcile the tunnel imaginative and prescient of being alive with a quietly Teutonic awe on the vastness of getting lived. Some eye-level pictures are clearly tethered to the angle of a sure character, whereas others appear to stem from the POV of an invisible spirit crouching subsequent to them, as if assigning bodily dimension to the third-person of our remembered pasts.
Intimate and infinite in equal measure, the film’s freeform construction and emotional tonality would possibly evoke all the things from “The Hours” and “The Virgin Suicides” to Robert Zemeckis’ “Right here,” and Charli XCX’s “Woman, so complicated” (why not), however its model discovered me returning to Edward Yang’s magnificent “Yi Yi” as essentially the most fast level of reference. Particularly, the character of eight-year-old Yang-Yang, who pictures the backs of individuals’s heads to be able to present them the elements of themselves they’ll’t see on their very own.
“You all the time see issues from the skin, however by no means your self,” certainly one of Schilinski’s characters muses in a snippet of the diaristic voiceover that holds this movie collectively. She rues the truth that blushing externalizes the precise emotion that somebody is attempting to cover, simply as Angelika — who’s cannonballing into her sexuality, and rumored to be sleeping along with her uncle — resents that she will be able to will her legs to maneuver, however not her coronary heart to cease beating.
Do our brains flip the world rightside up, or do they power us to see it the other way up? “Sound of Falling” isn’t disinterested in private drama, however that drama is reliably sublimated into the angle by which it’s skilled. So tenderly in contact with the shared however unstated traumas which can be visited upon her forged of younger ladies, Schilinski mines great sorrow from the key poetics of girlhood; she weaponizes cinema’s capacity to entry the deepest interiors of human feeling, and swirls her characters collectively in a manner that tortures them for his or her subjectivity.
The extra intimately we come to grasp the harm and heartache that Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka all expertise in their very own methods, the extra it kills us that they aren’t in a position to commiserate with one another (the movie’s temporal porousness is heightened by its glancing consideration to varied social and political borders, a few of that are extra simply crossed than others). Nothing is new on this world, however ache turns us all into pioneers.
If solely the movie’s characters had the possibility to match notes, maybe they won’t share the identical affinity for self-erasure. However they do really feel each other (intangibly, the best way that an amputee would possibly scratch at a phantom limb), and the 150-minute “Sound of Falling” is held aloft by its compelling consideration to sense reminiscence. As one of many women places it: “It’s humorous how one thing can harm that’s now not there,” and that harm accrues an ethereal energy of its personal as Schilinski doubles again to flesh it out.
Her movie is piloted by sense reminiscence, its story (lots) much less involved with battle or incident than it’s with the excitement of a housefly, the chew of a fish, or the beat of that one pop music that Lenka and her solely buddy take heed to all summer season lengthy. Brittle silences give option to an ominous hum, and infrequently to the fuzz of a report needle in quest of the groove it must know its function. It’s the proper soundtrack for a reverie that spins in smaller and smaller circles till its consideration grows targeted sufficient to look at a single mote of chic transcendence — and to defy the gravity that’s been accrued from nearly 100 years of solitude.
“It’s too dangerous you by no means know if you’re at your happiest,” one of many women laments, and it’s true that none of those characters could ever have the ability to contextualize their feelings with the angle essential to survive them. However Schilinski’s arrestingly prismatic movie — so hazy and dense with element that it feels nearly unimaginable to completely take in the primary time by — retains sloshing its manner by the years till these blind spots start to look revelatory in their very own proper. These women can solely see a lot of themselves on their very own, however “Sound of Falling” so vividly renders the clean house between them that it involves really feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that solely the flicks might ever hope to indicate us.
Grade: A-
“Sound of Falling” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. MUBI releases the movie in 2026.
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