The ghosts that haunt the figures of this movie and by proxy their audience, are real. Not so literally, but for nary making an appearance they are frightfully present all throughout the experience of watching Sound of Falling, the chronicle across generations of various families living in an ancient farmhouse in northern Germany. Whether they derive from the history of the place or the links between the traumas of specifically the women and girls there, or just from some other force that imbues the home’s residents with a morbid curiosity around death -it is unclear. But their presence is undeniable.
Mascha Schilinski’s enigmatic and powerful epic drama which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival,is an utterly entrancing thing to experience. Psychologically transporting as much as spiritually so, it makes for a unique and resonating -as well as chilling- broad view portrait of distinctly feminine perspectives and anxieties over the span of a century, rendered grand in atmosphere and intonation. It’s effect is like a more focused, digestible version of Tarkovsky’s Mirror -in the sense that its characters and their stories are more than metaphors, impeccably so. But there is still a dreamlike tenor to the connective threads and the ambiguously daunting mood, training you to feel a sense of terror around every bend, even for seemingly innocuous or abstract things.
Weaving in and out of one another, the stories are each individually quite fascinating. There is Alma (Hanna Heckt), whose extensive family lives on the farm in the 1910s in scenes that can at times resemble Fanny and Alexander. She is a young girl just coming into an understanding of the concept of death after a playmate apparently passed of some illness. She lives under the watchful eye of a stern mother Emma (Susanne Wuest). About forty years later in the movie’s briefest quarter, a teenage Erika (Lea Drinda) is curious and sexually drawn to an amputee lying sick in the home in the aftermath of the Second World War. Her niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the 1980s is also sexually curious and eager for maturity and independence -teasing towards her cousin whilst being preyed upon by her uncle. Finally in the modern day is the family of young girl Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), moving to the farmhouse from Berlin with her parents and little sister Nelly (Zoë Baier) -both craving attention from their mother Christa (Luise Heyer) as they are drawn to the nearby Elbe River.
Among each of these figures, compelling and distinct in their own rights, the sharpest character of the film is the sound and how artfully it is employed by Schilinski and her exceptional team. Bubbling deep and tremulous under many a scene you might think it doesn’t belong to, the eeriness of the musical reverberations gives the movie a constant state of tension, sometimes building to something and sometimes not, but holding your attention regardless and keeping you astute towards everything on screen. A glimpse between other stories of Alma running through the labyrinth of hay in the barn, already a visually frightful concoction keeps you on edge and curious about what the significance of that space for that time is. It is highly reminiscent of the way Kubrick often used score and sound effects to create very effective mood. Schilinski’s use of the absence of sound is no less striking, cutting out an audio cue all of a sudden, before bringing it back for the next scene. She will amplify the natural sounds around the environment in a manner that casts them as chaotic in their mundaneness. But it is not just an effect of low horror, the soundtrack features a few light, friendly songs that play over moments of peaceful catharsis -what’s disturbing is how they are juxtaposed with moments flirting on near-death.
Alma is curious and uncomfortable about the implications of death, both Angelika and Nelly fantasize about death -as a means of escape for the former, attention for the latter, but both with something of a sense of relief. Lenka postulates on death via strawberry vs. vanilla popsicles -the former, more adventurous flavour in the hands of her friend somehow a sign of an early death in Lenka’s eyes for reasons (like many in childhood) not very measurable. Even Alma’s fear seems intertwined with fascination. Could this be an effect of the house? That it raises these thoughts and considerations in the minds of those living there? Perhaps. But they bring their own unique experiences too that inform these observations and feelings.
There is a lot of unspoken trauma in the lives of each point-of-view character -unspoken but deftly alluded to. The sexual connotations of Angelika’s uncle implicitly grooming her into her sexual provocations and complicated body image. An outlet of her thoughts reveals she knows the way her uncle and cousin look at her body and the notion of desirability excites her. On a similar note, Lenka -who is significantly younger- is cognizant of the way one of the neighbourhood men watches her during a moment of accidental exposure. Alma does not have to deal with such creeps, but she does witness and only barely comprehends the dim arranged marriage of her older sister to a leering local. It is put into motion by her mother, whose authoritarianism over the children is itself incredibly fascinating -and twisted. The motif of a one-legged man coming back as it is suggested she hobbled her own son to prevent him from having to fight (and likely die) in the Great War. She herself, after some psychosomatic guilt perhaps, is unable to walk afterwards. And Alma takes it all in with a kind of instinctual coldness -something she has in common with her descendants, more able to assess their situations and griefs.
These experiences and their connection with the mood of the film is inextricably feminine in nature. The emotions and perceptions either under or at the surface read as distinct to the experiences and observations of young women on matters of sex, development, and death. The intense atmosphere functions excellently as an illustration of the turmoil of the mind, dealing with and processing the unique traumas and fascinations each character contends with and passes down in a spectral ripple effect -with especially frightful connotations in the end. But though the tone suggests a chilling harshness, Schilinski’s direction is enormously empathetic, to both the terrors and their reprieves for these girls. One of the best scenes is just the underwater explorations of Lenka and Kaya (Ninel Geiger), herself a curious figure -a neighbour girl from a difficult home- whom Lenka befriends and emanates.
Schilinski lets us sit in mystery with the fates of each character, though the insinuations, breathtakingly articulated, are grim, or at least unsettled. Yet there is a beauty in the enigma as well, that is acceptable -as much as catharsis may be craved. Sound of Falling however is not that kind of movie. It is mystifying but not impenetrable, esoteric but captivating. A movie that demands to be felt more than read. On that note, Schilinski gives her audience a lot to be drawn by. Whether it is the strange fixations on sweaty navels or flies or the picture of an apparent ghost with Alma’s mother -that she recreates as an experiment. Or the river, barely twenty feet wide that separates the world of this farm from an unknown world outside its influence. I want to go back and experience it more, to dissect its myriad meanings. As I think about it, it becomes the most unnerving movie of the year. But it is a sensory trip, and a gorgeous and inviting film in spite of its dismal airs. A haunted house movie of a calibre all its own.
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