Sound of Falling (2025)
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and having seen it, I think the jury got it right. The film rewards sustained attention, building meaning across its running time in ways that a single viewing will register but probably not exhaust.
Set across a century in a single farmhouse in Germany’s Altmark region, the film traces four girls: Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka. Each is growing up in the same house, each separated by decades, each entirely unaware of the others. They share walls, thresholds, and a quality of longing that the film refuses to name directly. Schilinski, who co-wrote the screenplay with Louise Peter, does not explain what connects these women across time. She constructs a film whose meaning emerges from pattern and recurrence rather than from stated argument, which makes demands on the viewer that not everyone will find welcome.
Fabian Gamper’s cinematography is, in my opinion, the film’s single greatest achievement. His camera moves with a kind of unhurried attentiveness, treating the farmhouse as a structure that has absorbed successive generations of feeling and that gives those feelings back, across the film’s span, with no great interest in keeping them in order. Some images are hazy, as though recalled at a distance; others press close with an abruptness that is almost physical. Gamper and Schilinski have arrived at a visual language that does the expressive work the dialogue declines to do.
The ensemble cast earns every minute of the film’s considerable runtime. Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, and Lea Drinda are particularly fine, each rooted so specifically in her own era that the film’s broader argument, about what women carry across generations, without being consulted about it, arrives as felt experience rather than as a position paper. Sustaining that kind of conviction across a deliberately fragmented structure, without the usual props of narrative momentum, requires considerable skill from all three.
At 149 minutes, Sound of Falling does test its audience. The mosaic structure, for all its intelligence, has stretches where the film’s opacity becomes less a deliberate withholding than an absence of signal, and a viewer hoping for narrative resolution will not find much on offer. Schilinski appears entirely at peace with this. Viewers who find themselves similarly settled will receive the film well; others may find the final third a patience-testing exercise.
The recurring image of the farmhouse, standing across wars and the long aftermath of ideological rupture that followed them, is where the film does its most patient work. Each generation of women inhabits the house without knowledge of the others, yet the house registers all of them and holds their gestures and their grief without hierarchy or preference. By the time the film ends, that building has accrued a weight that no single scene could have carried alone.
Sound of Falling is demanding, beautifully made, and, for those who meet it on its own terms, genuinely moving. It is, in my view, one of the most accomplished European films of recent years, and Schilinski announces herself here as a director of the first order. It deserves your full attention and, ideally, a seat you will not want to leave in a hurry.