Sound Of Falling
In an old farmhouse in the Altmark region, four young women — Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka — live, in different moments of the last century and of our present, seasons of life that seem separated by time and yet inescapably bound to one another. The house, with its storytelling rooms, corridors that know silent footsteps, faded photographs, fragile walls that store layers of quiet, becomes a vessel for their small and large tragedies: sufferings, traumas, secrets, family rituals, forbidden desires, unspoken or barely suggested abuses. The narrative refuses linearity: lives shatter, return, echo, overlapping like shadows crossing the same ground, breathing the same wind — but in different eras. Thus, past and present converse in a continuous reverberation of bodies and memories, of inherited pains, of lives that fall and fall again upon that same soil, over and over.
Reviewed by Fabian
28. November 2025
The ghosts we inherit never truly die: they merely demand to be recognized.
— Sigmund Freud
— Sigmund Freud
From a technical and stylistic standpoint, Sound of Falling unfolds as a work crafted with the meticulousness of a devoted artisan. Mascha Schilinski’s direction manifests in every frame like a living tableau: Fabian Gamper’s cinematography shapes space into claustrophobic yet disorienting frames — each image feels like a suspended instant, a portrait of imprisoned souls. The lights, the shadows, the noises — whispers, creaks, muffled sounds — the sparse, hypnotic score — all together construct an atmosphere that, more than narrating, induces a constant state of tension. This is not a film that “shows,” but one that “makes one feel”: a sensory, metaphorical experience in which body, space, time, and memory contaminate each other.
The cast, too, faithfully adheres to the spirit of the work: faces and bodies that carry epochs, wounds, expectations, and seem moved by interior ghosts more than by words. Temporal shifts, narrative ellipses, and the blend of subjective viewpoints and dreamlike visions transform the farmhouse into a psychological and metaphysical labyrinth, where time ceases to be a line and becomes a circle of returns and repetitions.
And yet — and this is where the film, in its grand ambition, ultimately stumbles — all this formal care resolves into an exercise that celebrates its own style more than any true expressive necessity. The narrative design, fragmented and often allusive to the brink of indistinctness, risks becoming a labyrinth for its own sake: the interwoven generations, the symbols, the spectral atmospheres do not always converge into a clear moral or existential discourse, but remain like shadows which, though formally impeccable, fail to disclose anything concrete. There is no true emotional core: the dramas seem hinted at, never shown; tensions remain suspended; punishment, redemption, understanding stay off-screen. The result is a film that — to borrow a philosophical comparison — contemplates its own beauty as if that alone could give meaning to the pain it seeks to represent.
In this sense, Sound of Falling ends up embodying that rather self-referential type of cinema. A magnificently crafted work, a radical aesthetic ambition that risks concealing a substantial void, pursuing artistic self-gratification rather than engaging in a sincere exploration of the human, of violence, of memory.
Sound of Falling can be a visual artwork of striking beauty, yet it risks remaining a convex mirror: lovely to look at, but distorting — capable of returning powerful images without giving them any real weight.
The director seems to look to Haneke’s The White Ribbon as a possible model: the rural community as a closed microcosm, hereditary violence circulating without ever being named, silence as a narrative device. Sound of Fallinglikewise adopts a rigorous mise-en-scène, built on subtraction, ellipsis, and spaces heavy with dark memories. However, while in Haneke formal rigor is an ethical act — a way of dissecting the roots of power and guilt — in Schilinski’s work that rigor often becomes pure style, an aesthetics of suspension that ends up contemplating itself rather than the world it intends to question.
Time is a murderer that never dirties its hands.
— Emil Cioran
— Emil Cioran