Do you ever think a director is rubbing their hands together in glee at the idea of their audience being a little perplexed by what’s happening on screen? For long swathes of Sound of Falling, the second film from German director Mascha Schilinski, I was wondering how its threads tied together. It’s a massive film: At two-and-a-half hours, it chronicles four generations of young women from the same family tree isolated in a farmhouse in Germany and its immediate surroundings. So far, so Cannes Film Festival.
You could think of it as a strange take on the haunted house subgenre in some ways. The farm is the film’s only constant, and its corridors, barns, and streams feel like they harbor a dark, hysterical energy that’s poisoning those who inhabit them with insidious thoughts.
It’s not just that the farm itself feels haunted—the film itself jumps between decades. We watch a series of young women have their innocence snatched from them. The eras are never signposted, but we can work our way forwards from a scene of conscription in the first storyline and how the characters age. It’s around the 1920s, the ’70s, and contemporary times.
In the ’20s, a girl no older than seven named Alma sees a picture of a girl who looks eerily similar to her, slumped in a chair, dead, her mother standing over her. It sets off a life shaped by voyeurism, her smallness helping her see through the cracks into situations she shouldn’t bear witness to, of sex and extreme violence.
Decades later, Alma is a mother, a little vacant, and Angelika is her daughter, our new protagonist. Angelika’s a young hippie, having a strange non-sexual but sort of romantic relationship with her cousin, while being abused by her uncle. She dreams of being churned up by a combine harvester—and a new life.
“It has the spirit of The Virgin Suicides but with a supremely gothic, Germanic energy”
In the present day, two young sisters, Lina and Netty, are enjoying a leisurely summer on the farm, swimming in the streams and having parties in the courtyard. The arrival of a new girl, who inserts herself into her life, provokes a sense of desire Lina, the eldest of the two, hasn’t felt before: The desire to be liked. Meanwhile, Netty has her mind on other things.
If these stories feel disparate in direction, that chop-and-change difference gives the film a jarring texture. We’ll move what feels like a century with the ease of an opened door. There are consistent motifs throughout all of them: eels, amputees, sexual deviance, bare breasts, suicidal ideation, flies, biting, violence, the repetition of the word “warm.”
It has the spirit of The Virgin Suicides but with a supremely gothic, Germanic energy: often fatalistic in its grimness, but peppered with a sense of empathy for the world these women find themselves in. Side note: For anyone who’s read The Discomfort of Evening, the International Booker-winning novel by Lucas Rijneveld, this has equally dirty fingernails.
When the screen cut to black for one last time, I wasn’t entirely sure that what I had watched had made much sense, but I was shaken and moved by it. It’s an audacious exercise in contemporary filmmaking, brimming with beauty and severity and interesting ideas. Afterwards, I made a group chat with some friends I’d seen it with so we could all ask each other questions about it: Who was that? How do they know each other? Is so-and-so related to so-and-so? Why did that happen? What does the ending mean? Does it even have an ending? There are some who might say that’s a failure of a film, an opaqueness designed to make you think it’s smarter than it actually is. I get that, and I don’t wholly disagree with it, but I found myself thinking about Sound of Falling for a long time after it finished, like it was some stunning parasite that had buried itself inside of my brain.
“Sound of Falling” premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2025.