Movie Review: Echos of the Past Ring Loudly in 'Sound of Falling'

Mascha Schilinski's saga of generational trauma confronts lingering questions

“If these walls could talk…” According to the logline for Mascha Schilinski’s generational family drama Sound of Falling, they can; or, at least, they preserve enough of the past that repeated traumas can be sensed as they echo through the ages.

The film jumps between decades, sketching out the stories of four generations of young women who suffer the misdeeds of men. Chronologically, the story picks up with Alma (Hanna Heckt), who is a young girl living at the family farm in rural Germany just before World War I. Nothing really begins here; Alma is obsessed with a photo of a girl from years earlier who bore the same name and had the same blonde locks. That long-ago Alma is preserved in a photo that shows her corpse dressed nicely and propped on a sofa in a so-called “death photograph,” a sort of memorial image in which a departed loved one was reimagined (not necessarily convincingly) as still alive and part of a family’s daily interactions. (This was a craze in Victorian England, but it’s not improbable that the practice would have jumped the channel to find its way to Europe.)

(Anna Heckt in Sound of Falling. MUBI.)

The Alma of the early 20th Century — that pre-WWI and WWII time of innocence — has an underlying, or at least parallel, cause for her morbid curiosity: Her brother Fritz (Filip Schnack) has lost a leg in what the family report to the authorities as a “work accident.” In actuality, the idea was to make him ineligible for military service — but the devastation of the ruse leaves Fritz so emotionally hobbled that we mostly see him lying in bed from that point onward, naked and tended to hand, foot, and otherwise by a maid who has been rendered sterile thanks to the patriarchal need to make female servants “safe for men.”

Skipping forward to a time just after WWII, the movie brings us to Erika (Lea Drinda), who also has an obsession: Her Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), the same bed-ridden man, now older but still naked and, evidently, alluring. Erika borrows his crutches in order to simulate his lack of a leg on herself, and stands over him as he sleeps, hungrily caressing his bare, lean belly.

(Lena Urzendowsky in Sound of Falling. MUBI.)

Fast forward once more, and the farm is now situated in what has become East Germany. Communist rule has not elevated human nature; Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) has an incestuous relationship going on with her hypermasculine uncle, Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst). It’s unclear exactly how consensual this inappropriate sexual arrangement is, but Angelika is not shy about using it as leverage for what she wants. What does become clear is that it’s not a secret; Uwe’s son, and Angelika’s cousin, Rainer (Florian Geisselmann), pines and sulks, wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps as regards the beautiful young woman.

In contemporary, post-GDR times (or the very recent past), Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) experiences her own unorthodox ardor: An infatuation with a friend named Kaya (Ninel Geiger), who seems to adopt the family after the loss of her mother. (This hint of lesbian attraction may be intended as a signal of modern times, though in many ways life on the farm seems much as it was in times past.)

(Lea Drinda in Sound of Falling. MUBI.)

Moments of fantasy and fantastical passages abound. One young woman lies down in a field of tall grass next to a sleeping fawn, knowing they are both in the path of a large approaching mower. Angelika encounters a puzzling, perhaps supernatural, fate. Images of swimming, biting eels populate the movie to suggest that even when times look happy, there are horrors under the surface. At one point the family barters one of the daughters to another farmer; she’s to be a maid in exchange for some help in a time of need, and by now the film has made clear what sort of domestic duties that entails. The complexities of sexual politics and dynamics are not razed into simplistic terms of good and evil, but by the same token the film lets no one off the hook.

The pace and atmosphere of Sound of Falling are somewhat reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 epic Fanny and Alexander, and indeed there is a Nordic sensibility to the film that seems like it might be calibrated to achieve that effect (looping blonde braids, rambunctious youths, randy menfolk, and a husky German dialect that isn’t something you’d confuse for Hochdeutsch). But this is also a film that calls out institutional sexual abuse, refusing to accept the rationalization that the appropriation of others’ bodies and lives can be justified in the name of tradition.

“Sound of Falling” goes wide in U.S. theaters on January 16.