Death rolls off the screen in waves in almost every scene of Mascha Schilinski’s head-spinningly rich, clever, and sad second feature Sound of Falling. A memento mori brought to eerie life across a hefty 150-minute runtime that covers a century of German history, it is European Arthouse Cinema writ large with no reservations or embarrassments about its own seriousness. That’s always a risk to take, but it pays off in spades for Schilinski, Sound of Falling an utterly enrapturing experience of generation after generation of women and girls finding their places in a world that offers little but contempt and unrewarded suffering.
Revolving around a single family farmhouse across four eras (World War 1, World War 2, the divided ‘80s, and the present) Schilinski shows us the eerily intertwined and mirroring lives of the family’s women across the years. Some characters repeat, and every era is filled with multiple generations; from a great grandmother in the WW1 strand to a seven year old in the present there are almost 200 years of *life* on screen here, Schilinski finding her epic scope in this most human of places rather than sweeping vistas or recognisable historical events. If there are any ‘main’ characters in this grand ensemble they are Alma (Hanna Heckt), a jolly 8-ish year old navigating life with her older sisters in the 1910s, and Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a deeply damaged teenager in the ‘80s whose ongoing molestation by her own uncle is an open family secret.
Make no mistake, Sound of Falling is *bleak*. Very few of the women and girls in this family get out unscathed, Schilinski moving between sadness and concern for her heroines and simmering rage for the men who ruin them – a recurring motif of the way grown men’s hungry eyes traumatise young girls without even raising a finger is genuinely revolting. What stops it from becoming numbing, then, is the myriad fascinating insights Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter give into the ways the girls cope; some seek comfort, others obliteration. The weirdness of teenage girls, the mingling thrill and fear around sex in adolescence, and the strange familiarity some children seem to naturally have with death are subjects largely untouched in cinema, raising questions and taboos most filmmakers simply don’t want to deal with, but they’re all completely gripping here.
The cast are uniformly excellent at bringing this to life, the large, changing ensemble in the large, unchanging location really allowing this world to feel truly lived in. Every woman and girl in Sound of Falling (as well as one sensitive young man in the ‘80s segment) is haunted, a darkness behind their eyes captured perfectly by the actors young and old – in certain moments, Alma and Angelika look directly at us through the camera, and it’s chilling.
Sound of Falling switches eras and perspectives on a whim, like a tale told by a particularly frightening and morbid kid (we also don’t get the answers to why a lot of the events taking place are happening, further putting us in the headspace of the overwhelmed youth here), generally announced by a change in camera. Intuitively, the image gets clearer as we get closer to the present, but Schilinski goes for the fascinatingly unintuitive too. Most notably, the brighter the sun shines, the more colour seems to be washed from the world – the world of Sound of Falling is one most enjoyed by the characters when they’re not looking too clearly at it. The sound work is similarly wrong-footing and unnerving, noises of death (flies, fire etc) imposing at key moments, often without an immediately discernible source.
A grim, sprawling, and controversy-baiting epic, Sound of Falling is undoubtedly a film convinced of its own importance. What is incredible, then, is that it fully earns that conviction, a ferocious and uncompromising cry from the heart that is as rewarding as it is demanding, Malick by way of Haneke, the innocently spiritual and the viscerally suicidal side by side in an unforgettable, masterful tableau.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 