Over the course of a century, as four girls from different time periods experience their youth on a German farm, their lives become intertwined until time seems to dissolve.
The Doctor Says, I'll Be Alright but I'm Feelin' Blue, Looking at the Sun, 사운드 오브 폴링
Cannes Film Festival 
massive flick
Unfolding like 100 years of home video footage that were shot by the family ghosts, Mascha Schilinski’s rich and mesmeric “Sound of Falling” glimpses four generation of young women as they live, die, and suffuse their memories into the walls of a rural farmhouse in the north German region of Altmark.
In the 1940s, after some of the local boys are maimed by their parents in order to avoid fighting Hitler’s war, teenage Erika (Lea Drinda) hobbles through the halls with one of her tied legs up in string, eager to know what losing a limb might feel like. Unbeknownst to her, cherubic little Alma (Hanna Heckt) expressed a similar curiosity some 30 years earlier when she played dead on…
SOUND OF FALLING is an ambitious and impressionistic work of art from Mascha Schilinski, one that firmly marks her arrival at the next stage of her career. Set on a rural German farm, it unfolds as a fragmented, two-and-a-half-hour collage exploring the lives of four generations of young women. While its length and structure may test some viewers’ patience, I was completely swept away by its artistry. Hypnotic & deeply moving from the first stunning frame to the last, its hauntingly beautiful imagery and immersive sound design combine to create something both harsh & graceful.
Check out Dan Bayer’s full review on Next Best Picture here
You've heard to the male gaze, you've heard of the female gaze. Now try death's gaze.
Strong contender for my favorite thing from the festival's opening week.
Read the full review and the rest of my Cannes Week 1 recap here.
I’m about to see this a second time, so I’m just logging for good measure.
There’s so much to digest here and I’m not sure if it’s actually trying to cohere into a single point or is more a web of free associations but either way, this is some of the most haunting and beautiful filmmaking I’ve ever seen. More thoughts to come
The further I get away from “Sound of Falling,” the more I ire it. I’d love to see it again not half asleep on the second day of Cannes. But also, I think on a second watch I’d see a lot more of the shape of the nonlinear edit — which feels like it would be fuller and more cohesive on second viewing. In any case, there’s also some exceptional camera work here and the final act, so to speak, is crushing. In short, I’d say this rural-set, almost surreal narrative is like Tarkovsky if Tarkovsky had ever actually talked to a woman.
“It’s warm.”
The probing hum of Sound of Falling cuts in and out of its fractured, dreamlike journey like tinnitus. Something that feels painfully sharp and disorientating, but with enough time it fades back, becoming something you grow so accustomed to that you can convince yourself it’s gone even though it isn’t. How long before the sting fades? How quickly can it reignite?
Found myself growing increasingly desperate for the film to keep going, the gradual march toward the end leaving me hyperaware of my heart thrumming in my chest. There’s so much here that is so tangible and so precise, it’s hard not to get lost in the rapid blur of living despite an increasing urge to step into…
Unfolding like 100 years of home video footage that were shot by the family ghosts, Mascha Schilinski’s rich and mesmeric “Sound of Falling” glimpses four generation of young women as they live, die, and suffuse their memories into the walls of a rural farmhouse in the north German region of Altmark.
In the 1940s, after some of the local boys are maimed by their parents in order to avoid fighting Hitler’s war, teenage Erika (Lea Drinda) hobbles through the halls with one of her tied legs up in string, eager to know what losing a limb might feel like. Unbeknownst to her, cherubic little Alma (Hanna Heckt) expressed a similar curiosity some 30 years earlier when she played dead on the parlor room couch, posing in the same position that her late grandmother’s corpse had been placed for a post-mortem daugerreotype.
Our full review: www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/sound-of-falling-review-1235122968/
The Italians have a useful term for films—art-pieces, general statements, what have you—that revel in grandiose, relentlessly self-important storytelling: "Pippone." Normally, this term is intended as an insult, a designation of masturbatory vanity and an air of superiority that can't be matched by what's actually present in the piece. I, meanwhile, have graciously co-opted this term as one of endearment, a celebration of films demonstrating alienating austerity altogether justified in their ambiguity, serving a greater thematic coalescence.
Some films, simply put, are justified in their self-importance, and the longer you sit with Mascha Schilinski's Sound of Falling, the clearer it becomes that this is a "pippone" in only the most reverential sense. A film that makes no effort to hold…
An austere, fractured chronicle of four young girls across decades on a German farm that haunts and mesmerizes in equal measure. It’s kinda like if Carlos Reygadas made The Virgin Suicides. A banger start to Cannes.
My first movie at the Cannes Film Festival!
nothing less than a masterpiece.
