Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling

Over the course of two and a half hours, points of view flit between characters in four stories that, together, span more than a century. Four girls and their families live in a farmhouse in Altmark, a region in northern Germany butting up against the Elbe river: Alma (Hanna Heckt) at some point around 1910, Erika (Lea Drinda) just after the Second World War, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in 1980s East Germany, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in our present day.

Schilinski tells Deadline’s Damon Wise that she and cowriter Louise Peter were spending a summer in the region when they “happened upon a farm, and it seemed like time had stood still there. The house had been empty for fifty years, and by chance, we found a snapshot from 1920 in which three women, kind of unusually for the time, were looking straight at the camera. We were standing right where the camera would have stood, and we saw these women looking at us. So, we asked ourselves, ‘What happened here? What were their stories?’” That, she says, “got us thinking about the idea of synchronicity of time.”

“Fittingly, for a work about perspectives left out of the official record,” writes Willmore, “Schilinski frequently makes you feel like she is carving out a new film language with Sound of Falling, one that’s impressionistic and sensual, but also so grounded in the experiences of its girls that it’s like being dropped directly into their heads.”

At the Film Stage, Zhuo-Ning Su suggests that the film “plays like a psychosexual fever dream of epic scope,” while IndieWire’s David Ehrlich finds it “somehow both hyper-subjective and hauntingly disembodied all at once.” For Elena Lazic at the Playlist, it’s “as experiential as it is cerebral, by turns contemplative and full of bluster, juxtaposing ethereal beauty with brutal violence.”

“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,” writes Guy Lodge in Variety. This second feature “vaults the forty-one-year-old Berliner immediately to the forefront of contemporary German cinema.” The four stories “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.”

Sound of Falling prompts the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer to “question the very notion of what a movie can be,” and it has him trying to find a place for it on a hypothetical cultural map. “The closest thing that comes to mind is probably Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, although this is Malick by way of Jane Campion and Michael Haneke, shifting between fleeting coming-of-age moments and scenes of resolute darkness and human cruelty . . . With its epic scope and precisely drawn figures in the countryside, the film has the weight of a hefty nineteenth-century agrarian novel. But it’s told as a pure work of stream of consciousness, as if Virginia Woolf had decided to rewrite a book by Thomas Hardy.”

“Cinema is a relatively young art form,” Schilinski tells Marta Bałaga in Variety, “and I want to feel like I’m still exploring its possibilities. It’s very gratifying to be able to do that. This is what I’m hoping for: No limitations.”