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Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling arrives less as a film than as a slow, enveloping disturbance—an accumulation of textures, silences, and psychic echoes that seem to seep out of the screen and settle somewhere uncomfortably permanent. It is a work that resists easy taxonomy: part haunted-house story, part historical palimpsest, part sensory poem about the inheritance of pain. In her second feature, Schilinski not only confirms the promise of her debut but expands it into something far more formidable—an audacious, century-spanning vision of female experience that feels at once intimate and mythic, grounded and spectral.
The first signal of the film’s singularity is sonic. An ominous, droning rush recurs throughout, swelling like pressure in the ears before a plunge, or the sickening acceleration of a body succumbing to gravity. This sound—neither fully musical nor entirely environmental—becomes the film’s emotional undercurrent, binding together disparate timelines and subjectivities. It is less a motif than a force, suggesting inevitability, repetition, and the crushing weight of history itself. If the English title feels oblique, even evasive, it is perhaps because Schilinski is working in a register where language falters. The film trades not in clarity but in sensation, in half-formed recognitions and emotional residues that refuse to settle into neat articulation.
Set almost entirely on a remote farmstead in northern Germany, Sound of Falling traces the lives of four generations of girls across the 20th century and into the present day. Yet to describe it as a multi-strand narrative risks misrepresenting its method. Schilinski and her co-writer Louise Peter do not intercut these stories in any conventional sense; rather, they allow them to bleed into one another, to echo and refract across time. Scenes begin mid-thought and end mid-gesture. Perspectives shift without warning. Characters appear to sense one another across decades, as if the house itself were remembering.
At the film’s fractured center is Erika, ( Lea Drinda ) a red-haired teenager in the 1940s whose introduction is as disquieting as anything in recent cinema. Hobbling down a dim corridor on crutches, she initially appears injured, vulnerable. The revelation that she is feigning disability—her leg bound beneath her dress, the crutches borrowed from her amputee uncle—lands with unnerving force. When her father strikes her for this transgression, her response is not tears but a faint, ambiguous smile directed toward the camera. It is a moment that encapsulates the film’s uneasy relationship with spectatorship: these girls are seen, but not protected; observed, but not understood.
Erika’s story is only one thread in a densely woven tapestry. We are carried backward to the early 1900s, where young Alma ( Hanna Heckt ) navigates a household steeped in unspoken violence and ritualized suffering. Through her curious, watchful gaze, we glimpse the origins of family traumas that will reverberate for decades. A farmhand’s mutilation, a servant’s forced sterilization—these are not dramatized as singular events but absorbed into the fabric of daily life, their horror dulled by repetition.
Moving forward, the film settles briefly in the 1980s, where Angelika, ( Lena Urzendowsky ) on the cusp of adulthood, becomes entangled in a web of desire and exploitation that blurs the boundaries between affection and abuse. In the present day, the farmhouse is occupied by a middle-class Berlin family whose daughters, Lenka ( Laeni Geiseler ) and Nelly, ( Zoë Baier ) seem at first removed from this legacy. Yet Schilinski gradually reveals the persistence of unease, the subtle ways in which the past intrudes upon the present—not as explicit memory, but as atmosphere, as inherited anxiety.
What emerges is not a linear history but a kind of emotional archaeology. Schilinski excavates patterns of behavior, gestures, and violations that recur across generations, suggesting that the true continuity lies not in bloodlines but in structures of power. Patriarchy, in Sound of Falling, is not a backdrop but an omnipresent condition—mutable in form, perhaps, but relentless in its effects.
Formally, the film is as rigorous as it is elusive. Shot in a constricted Academy ratio, the images possess a suffocating intimacy, as though the characters were trapped not only within their environment but within the frame itself. Cinematographer Fabian Gamper employs a range of textures—grainy, desaturated compositions that evoke decaying photographs; blurred, pinhole distortions that suggest memory in the process of disintegration. The palette is dominated by muted browns and ashen blacks, occasionally punctured by a startling blue that feels less like color than intrusion.
Schilinski’s visual strategy finds its counterpart in the film’s editing, which is both precise and disorienting. Scenes are truncated, rearranged, revisited from altered perspectives. Time folds in on itself. The effect is less that of a puzzle to be solved than of a consciousness attempting to process trauma—circling, fragmenting, resisting closure. Evelyn Rack’s editing does not guide the viewer so much as implicate them, forcing an active engagement with the film’s gaps and silences.
Performance, too, operates in a deliberately restrained register. Dialogue is sparse, often secondary to gesture and gaze. The young actresses—particularly Hanna Heckt as Alma and Lena Urzendowsky as Angelika—convey entire emotional landscapes through minute shifts in expression. Their characters exist in states of watchful apprehension, their inner lives suggested rather than declared. Voiceover, when it appears, is shared among them, blurring individual identity into something more collective—a chorus of female experience that transcends time.
There are moments of startling, almost surreal imagery: a girl stepping out of a photograph and vanishing; underwater sequences in which eels writhe through murky currents; the persistent presence of flies, their droning amplified to oppressive levels. These elements do not function as symbols in any straightforward sense. Instead, they contribute to a pervasive sense of unease, of a world slightly out of joint.
If the film invites comparison, it is to artists who have similarly grappled with the limits of representation in the face of historical trauma. Yet Schilinski’s voice feels distinctly her own—less interested in homage than in forging a language adequate to her subject. The result is a film that is, in the best sense, difficult: resistant to summary, to easy interpretation, to passive consumption.
And yet, for all its formal complexity, Sound of Falling is not an abstract exercise. Its emotional impact is cumulative and profound. By the time the film reaches its quiet, devastating conclusion, one feels not only the weight of the individual stories but the enormity of what connects them—the persistence of systems that diminish, silence, and brutalize, even as they evolve.
Schilinski offers no facile resolutions, no comforting narratives of progress. The past does not recede; it lingers, embedded in spaces and bodies alike. If there is a form of hope here, it lies not in escape but in recognition—in the act of seeing, of refusing to let these histories dissolve into silence.
With Sound of Falling, Mascha Schilinski announces herself as a filmmaker of rare ambition and control, capable of transforming the most intimate experiences into something vast and resonant. It is a film that unsettles, challenges, and ultimately endures—a work that, like its haunting central motif, continues to reverberate long after the screen goes dark.
