Sound of Falling

Sound of Falling, directed by Mascha Schilinski, is a haunting, century-spanning drama that interweaves the lives of four generations of young women across a single, weathered farmhouse in northern Germany. The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize, operates less as a linear narrative and more as a poetic, impressionistic tapestry of memory, trauma, and female resilience. Its structure—non-chronological, fragmented, and deeply atmospheric—mirrors the way the past lingers in the present, with each generation haunted by the same silent, unspoken forces: patriarchal control, war, loss, and the suppression of desire.

Mascha Schilinski masterfully uses visual and sonic motifs to bind the timelines: a hole in the barn door, keyholes, flies buzzing, and a crescendoing bass drone that signals transitions between eras. These elements create a dreamlike, almost ghostly atmosphere, where the house itself becomes a living archive. The film’s central conceit is that history is not a story told, but a feeling carried - a "ghost" not of spirits, but of unresolved pain passed down through time. As critic Sheila O’Malley notes, "The ghost is history."

The four protagonists:

Alma (Hanna Heckt), in the 1910s, a child in a repressive household, spies on her brother Fritz, an amputee whose leg was removed to avoid conscription. 

Erika (Lea Drinda) in the 1940s, wartime Germany, binds her leg like her uncle’s, a gesture of identification with suffering. 

Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in 1980s East Germany, the GDR, is sexually objectified by her uncle and feels trapped by ideology and surveillance.

Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the present-day modern era still grapples with grief and identity, her world more open but emotionally suffocated by inherited silence.

Each confronts the limits of agency in their respective eras. Their stories are marked by unspoken longings, bodily autonomy denied, and the ever-present shadow of death. 

The film’s sound design is pivotal - silence, creaking floors, and sudden roars evoke psychological tension. The title, Sound of Falling, references both the literal fall from a hayloft and the philosophical question: Does a falling tree make a sound if no one hears it? Schilinski suggests that the emotional weight of the past is real, even when unacknowledged. The film’s original German title, “In Die Sonne Schauen“/“Staring at the Sun”, further underscores the theme of confronting unbearable truths.

Critics have praised the film’s formal daring, emotional depth, and feminist resonance. As The New Yorker’s Justin Chang observes, Schilinski avoids explicit depictions of violence, instead using subtlety and suggestion to convey abuse, sterilisation, and psychological trauma. The result is a film that feels both timeless and urgent - a meditation on how trauma echoes across generations, and how the body remembers what the mind cannot speak.

Sound of Falling is not a film of easy answers. It resists closure, leaving viewers with lingering unease and a profound sense of empathy for the women who lived, suffered, and disappeared—whose lives, though erased from official history, continue to reverberate in the walls of the house and in the hearts of those who come after.