Sound of Falling

‘Funny how something can hurt when it’s no longer there,’ a little girl muses upon witnessing an amputee’s phantom leg pain. She could as easily be speaking of the transgenerational trauma at the heart of Mascha Schilinski’s stunningly accomplished Sound of Falling, winner of the Jury Prize in Cannes. Its original title, which translates as ‘staring into the sun’, was surely ironic, for this is an eclipse-black vision of the darkest recesses of the human condition.

The film takes place in a single location – a farm and nearby river in rural Germany – across four time periods: the stultifyingly austere 1910s, the war-benighted 1940s, pre-unification 1980s, and early 2020s. Scenes in the earliest timeframe, experienced from the point of view of the aforementioned girl, are shot like a sepia-tinted Lynchian nightmare. The effect is deeply unsettling, but entirely appropriate for a family that exists in a kind of living death of shame, repression and abuse. (You’ll never again hear the phrase ‘workplace accident’ without shuddering involuntarily.) When they stage a ‘death photograph’ – the Victorian practice of taking family photographs complete with the often artificially enlivened corpse of a dead family member – it’s difficult to know who is alive and who is dead.

She’s conjured up a heady brew of superstition, folklore and repressed sexuality

As the foundational trauma of this period echoes and rhymes down the generations, the clothes, colour palette and film formats change, but the despair and disfunction remain, punctuated by all-too-brief moments of happiness. The farm has seen its share of horrors over the years, and there is a world of gliding monsters beneath the glassy surface of the river, but the events can’t be blamed on psychogeography of an Amityville house, a snowbound hotel, or a pet cemetery. The trauma here is inflicted, and endured, by humans.

In only her second feature – her first, The Daughter, is scandalously unavailable outside of Germany – Schilinski shows a remarkable mastery of the medium, announcing her as an important voice in world cinema. With The Sound of Falling, she’s conjured up a heady brew of tradition, superstition, folklore and repressed or aberrant sexuality. It’s all fuelled by a creeping dread that’s worthy of the Grimm brothers.

It’s a cliché to say that a film will stay with you long after you leave the cinema. This one could haunt you to the grave.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Mar 6.