Review: ‘Sound of Falling’
2025 / Dir. Mascha Schilinski
☆ 4/5
Watch if you like: the idea of Michael Haneke doing a remake of The Virgin Suicides.
Sound of Falling treats family genealogy like a ghost story of inherited sense memories, trauma, and heartache. Blending and blurring four generations of women over a hundred years on an East German farmhouse, Schilliski’s film explores the commonalities and ugly brutalities these women face, each experiencing these echoes of the past that feel like coming-of-age moments to them, often revolving around death.
In the earliest section, a young girl is spellbound by a death photo of a young girl she never met from an earlier generation that looks like her and wears her dress, and becomes obsessed with her own inevitable death. Later, her 1980s counterpart will take a similarly eerie photograph and daydream of being run over by farm equipment. Filmed like a death photograph itself, Sound of Falling peers through keyholes and around corners to capture its moments, giving the film a truly haunted feeling even if it’s not an explicitly supernatural tale. There’s a dense collage of connections here—too many for just one viewing—and I suspect that in the years to come, Sound of Falling will continue to reveal its mysteries and grow in acclaim.