Sound of Falling

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

SOUND OF FALLING   ***1/2

Mascha Schilinski

2025

IDEA:  The lives of four generations of women are glimpsed across nearly a century in and around a farmhouse estate in east Germany.

BLURB:  Sound of Falling is a mighty, forbidding cataract of densely woven visuals and soundscapes as likely to leave one awed as flummoxed. Despite its periodization, it doesn’t so much narrate a history of reverberating domestic terrors as impressionistically embody their affects, which, perhaps, escape narrativization. Floating across time, inhabiting multiple points of view (including, often, a conspicuous 8 mm camera gaze), and slipping through an indistinguishable mesh of reality, memory, and imagination, Sound of Falling conducts an excavation of sedimented psychic pain in which all that can be recovered are the ghostly traces. With the source of trauma never seen or understood — obscured as it is by the inchoate, restricted POVs of the young female protagonists and the silence of their elders — Schilinski offers up strange, looping audiovisual effusions that suggest what can’t be made visible. These have a chilling, Gothic dream logic: a pale blonde girl clad in black, recreating an old photo of an identical forebear sitting limp on a sofa beside a pair of dolls; a lamprey clamping down between a woman’s index finger and thumb; all the titular falling, into rivers and on barn floors, accompanied by crackling vinyl (or film projector?) sounds. Schilinski refuses to moor us in this seething transhistorical miasma, even as we sometimes hear characters in voiceover poetically give shape to their thoughts and feelings (“It’s funny how something can hurt when it’s not there anymore”). This excessive fragmentation can make it a trying task to keep track of or even identify characters, timelines, and events. Surely, as well, this is part of Schilinski’s design, a deliberately discombobulating invocation of affects that seep across temporal boundaries and take ahold of you, like a woman who can’t control her smile (or gag reflex), with involuntary power.