Dir: Mascha Schilinski. Germany. 2025. 148,
“Suffering, sighing, bleeding, dying; sealed in a stone cold tomb”.
The trauma of four generations of German women is captured in this macabre patchwork portrait of dour life in a farm in Eastern Germany. Secrets are embedded in the walls of their lugubrious family home only to seep out onto the next generation and poison their wellbeing, like black mould. Silent and deadly. Grimms’ fairy tales spring to mind here. The film often feels like a stream of consciousness, but this works to its advantage in recording the unreliable nature of memory, false memory and buried mental torture.
Mascha Schilinski’s second feature touches on grief, confusion and anxiety. Accepting without understanding the mysteries and tragedies that befall a family is at the core of this thrilling but often enigmatic work that eschews a structured narrative and instead leaves the viewer to piece together the story and make sense of how each character relates to the others across the years from the mid 19th century until the present day.
An accident at work that leads to a gruesome amputation; an inexplicable death; a vision of a little boy in a coffin; strange unexplained ailments, and even infertility, are left to Alma, the youngest girl, to fathom out. A sepia photo of a ghostly mother looking down on a blond child dressed in black boots and bombazine. She died suddenly. They share the same name. So will little Alma (Hanna Heckt) die too by the end of the summer? She awaits her fate in trepidation and morbid fear. The others are tight-lipped as to her predecessor’s demise.
Those of us with a legacy of Victorian great-grandparents will relate to these often grim-faced photos. And to the haunting questions that hung over our generation of kids. Nowadays parents are more open with their children, rather than figures of authority, and everything is shared and discussed avoiding this kind of childhood trauma. Back then enigmatic snatches of overheard conversion still remained etched to our own memories, surfacing later and perpetuating unresolved anxieties which often remained an enigma, haunting us well into adulthood.
There are funny times too in The Sound of Falling, but these are few and far between: Alma and her siblings nail the maid’s clogs to the floor so she falls flat on her face. Women back then were often forced to accept casual acts of misogyny. The film shows how even as late as the 1980s Angelika (Lena Unrzendowsky) is faced with the unwanted demands of her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lyndhurst) leading to much soul-searching. The terrible past seems to permeate the family’s former home, so when a new family buys the farm, the heaviness of the haunted past is as difficult to erase as the stains on the wallpaper.
Schilinski’s TV series Cologne PD is well-known in Germany. Her 2017 debut Dark Blue Girl was another relatable modern day story about a perplexed child that won a few prizes for this visionary new arthouse director. @MeredithTaylor
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