SOUND OF FALLING
(director/writer: Mascha Schilinski; screenwriter: Louise Peter; cinematographer: Fabian Gamper; editor: Evelyn Rack; music: Elke Hosenfeld; cast: Hanna Heckt (Alma), Susanne Wuest (Emma), Lena Urzendowsky (Angelika), Luise Heyer (Christa), Filip Schnack (young Fritz), Martin Rother (Uncle Fritz), Greta Krämer (Lia), Laeni Geisler (Lenka), Luzia Oppermann (Trudi), Claudia Geisler-Bading (Irm), Gode Benedix (Max), Ninel Geiger (Kaya), Konstantin Lindhorst (Uncle Uwe), Lea Drindel (Erika), Florian Geisselmann (Rainer); Runtime: 149; MPAA Rating: NR; producers: Maren Schmitt, Lucas Schmidt; Mubi, Studio Zentral; 2025-Germany-in German & English, with English subtitles)
“An unsettling German folk-horror tale.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski (“Dark Blue Girl”) directs and co-writes this haunting drama with Louise Peter. It’s told in four chapters during four time periods, of four girls spending their childhood on the same rural Saxony-Anhalt farm in northern Germany. The four girls are: Alma (Hanna Heckt) in the 1910s, Erika (Lea Drindel) in the 1940s, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the 1980s, and Lenka (Laeni Geisler) in the 2020s Each mirrors each other, revealing hidden secrets and things they repressed about the guilt they shared over such things experienced as militarism, abuse, the female slavery of domestic servitude and living in the dreary pastoral world.
During WWI the young man named Fritz (Filip Schnack) has a leg amputated after a “work related accident”; he is nursed back to health by the abused maid Trudi (Luzia Oppermann). The 6-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) accepts her family’s fascination with “death photographs” of deceased family members, but is unduly upset by a “death photograph” of someone who resembles her.
On the same farm, during WWII, Erika has a morbid and erotic fascination with the older “Uncle Fritz” (Martin Rother) and with her own fantasy self-image as an amputee. During a later period, in the old East Germany, the teenager Angelika works on the farm, only to be abused by her vile Uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and is aware that Uwe’s son – her cousin Rainer (Florian Geisselmann) – is in love with her. When Angelika joins the family group for a Polaroid group photo, she experiences the same uncanny fate as did Alma. During modern times when Germany is unified, Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) befriends a strange, intense orphaned girl called Kaya (Ninel Geiger).
The girls are united not only by the farm, but by the nearby river that is part of the border with the west.
It’s an unsettling German folk-horror tale, a coming-of-age-film that brings up skeletons from the past as seen through the innocent eyes of children.
It played at the Cannes Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 12/13/2025 GRADE: A-
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