Sound of Falling film review-German Film Festival
*Matilda Cheshire viewed The Sound of Falling as part of the German FIlm Festival which is taking place at Palace Cinema this May.
Posted on Saturday 23 May,2026
She shares her thoughts on the film and implores readers to watch it.
The Sound of Falling is a showcase of the ring-master role of a director to catch and tame the cinematic elements of sound, lighting, and camera. Director Mascha Schilinski acts as a puppeteer pulling the strings of these elements to produce a unique audience experience.
Schilinski will not, however, hold your hand through this movie and may I suggest you familiarize yourself with the premise prior to watching.
If you’re looking for something stable to lean on, the film’s setting remains constant throughout. Its setting is a farmhouse in Armok, Germany and dips us into the lives of four women who live there from 1640 to 2020.
Through a fractured timeline, the narrative traces four generations of women bound to a solitary rural farmhouse, each (perhaps unknowingly) recipients of the echoes of those who came before them.
Though separate in time, the female characters are united by the trauma of the female experience. Being a mother, a sister, a daughter, a niece. The experience of being forgotten or ignored or flirted with or being assaulted or dancing in front of your bedroom mirror or laughing when you’re not supposed to or rolling down a grassy hill.
They unite too, in their daydreams of their own deaths.
Some objects are persistent and reappear in multiple timelines. They artfully show the differences between the periods. For example the dining room table which serves limpid soup and then sugary cakes and fruit.
The handed-down farmhouse keeps the secrets of each of the women’s lives. The same hay barn sees a flirtatious game, a purposeful leg break, a dead boy. The same river teaches swimming lessons and drowns a mass suicide.
I found myself traumatised by each location which left me with the expectation that something bad would happen to any character that entered it.
Costumes too show differences, from hand me downs from dead relatives to Birkenstocks and flat caps.
The director plays expertly with the camera’s perspective. We, the camera, look through keyholes and watch from the crack in a door. We join in and chase the little girls around the house then we are the little girl looking down at her shoes.
The sound is manipulated as well. With some louder than anticipated or expected in real life. A picture frame being placed down on the table is deafening. You can heap a flys feet tapping as it walks along a China bowl. A characters swallow of saliva is louder than their speech.
The movie has won 12 awards and been nominated 54 times. This includes best director, best sound, best independent film, and was the German entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. Most notably, it won the prestigious Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Critics don’t appreciate the astounding levels of grimness in the womens’ lives, it’s not a light watch. Emma Kiely at Collider called it “a hollow, navel-gazing glamourisation of female suicide, incest, sexual assault,” and reared at the lacking analysis of how systems allow such suffering. I agree with her point that the characters are underdeveloped but not that the film “feels exploitative”.
Grim hardship and grotesque reality are not romanticized by this film as Kiely says, as instead of envious I felt frankly unwell for most of this film’s duration. Perhaps beacuse I felt deja vu ripple under my pale skin when recognized my own female experience in the expression on their faces. Or I recognize the sound of my voice in their inner monologues we hear.
The film is an aesthetic exploration of the female experience, with all of the ugly trimmings on top.
Director Schilinski deserves for this film to be indulged in at the cinema. It’s under reliance on script allows subtitle readers to properly immerse in the cinematography – for which I was grateful.
The German Film Festival is on at Palace Cinema this May and frankly you have no excuse not to go.
If you can stomach it, which I promise you can, ……it will leave a mark on you in the best way possible.
