The opening line of L.P. Hartley's seminal coming-of-age novel The Go-Between reads, "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." That sentiment resonates throughout writer and director Mascha Schilinski's film, Sound of Falling.
Schilinski's second feature is enclosed in a farm courtyard and nearby river in the Altmark region of Germany, starting around the First World War and spanning past the end of Communism. The drama draws us in through the eyes of four German girls from different generations as they struggle to make sense of their inner lives in harshly dissonant, half-occluded family dynamics unfolding around them. Sound of Falling charts its young characters with great emotional precision, each rooted in their own temporally enclosed drama and yet haunting the next, creating a visual and narrative palimpsest that propels the film.
Quietly unfolding as a folk-horror of German history, the stories in the film are told from the peripheries and through the eyes of its most liminal of subjects: the girls in Sound of Falling are all on the verge of becoming ghosts, and we are witnesses at a seance.
During World War I, Alma (Hanna Heckt), the youngest girl of her family, observes how her older brother Fritz (Filip Schnack), an amputee, is spared from conscription and discovers that the dresser of photographs of dead children posed for posterity contains an image of her namesake. During the last year of the Third Reich, Erika (Lea Drinda) slips into a morbid, erotic obsession with the now-aging "Uncle Fritz" (Martin Rother), her desire knotted with a disturbing private fantasy in which she imagines herself to be an amputee like him. We are made aware of the horrors of war only in moments just long enough to register their enormity. In the rancid atmosphere of the farm in the communist East in the 1980s, the teenage Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), is subject to the causal cruelty of her abusive uncle. When Angelika runs out of frame in a posed family Polaroid, the camera catches her as an apparition, and like all the female protagonists before her in Schilinski's film, she vanishes from her time and slips into history, leaving only a trace. Finally, framing the narrative in the post-wall period, newcomers from Berlin purchase the now-abandoned farm and start to renovate it; disturbing the unquiet spirits within its walls. The lonely Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) is drawn into an uncanny and obsessive friendship with neighbor Kaya (Ninel Geiger).
Throughout, we learn devastating truths through cracks in old wooden doors, viewed by the girls furtively through keyholes, as they emerge breathless from under murky water or after crawling out of tunnels of sun-drenched hay. Transitions from candlelight to an electric bedside lamp or changes in the style of shoes are often the initial markers of a shift to another era.
What matters for Schilinski are the relationships of these girls to their inner worlds as they are torn asunder by what happens out of frame or in passing without further explanation — what is grimly agreed to at a kitchen table with a strange man, or betrayed by a request for a lullaby.
The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2025, the first from a German director to do so since 1959. That year, the prize went to Konrad Wolf's East German holocaust drama Stars. That is worth noting: on the international stage up until now, German cinema has predominantly found success when it has explicitly been about Germany at war or life under dictatorship, in one form or another. Schilinski's film is a notable departure: there is nary a swastika or a Stasi agent in sight. Like so many of the most powerful elements in Schiliniski's film, these remain just out of frame and remain all the more powerfully present as a result.
Schilinski has made a German film set in the German past that has avoided many of the pitfalls of a national genre often stymied by what seem like rote and obligatory cultural caveats — played out in heavy-handed, albeit well-meaning, explanatory narratives peppered with anxiously penitent references to the Holocaust and redemptive "good Germans."
Sound of Falling is visually seductive, sometimes overwhelmingly so. The color palettes offer an other-worldly depth to the images which are guided by a camera that often feels like a ghostly presence itself, lending the film immersive charm and unease. The writing is pitch-perfect, eschewing explanation and granting the audience the rarest of cinematic pleasures: the permission to be immersed without a lecture, the quiet intelligence that invites empathy without virtue signaling.
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