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25-05-2025
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‘Sound of Falling' Review: Four Generations of German Girls Suffer the Same Growing Pains in Mascha Schilinski's Mesmerizing Stunner
Unfolding like 100 years of home video footage that were shot by the family ghosts, Mascha Schilinski's rich and mesmeric 'Sound of Falling' glimpses four generation of young women as they live, die, and suffuse their memories into the walls of a rural farmhouse in the north German region of Altmark. In the 1940s, after some of the local boys are maimed by their parents in order to avoid fighting Hitler's war, teenage Erika (Lea Drinda) hobbles through the halls with one of her tied legs up in string, eager to know what losing a limb might feel like. Unbeknownst to her, cherubic little Alma (Hanna Heckt) expressed a similar curiosity some 30 years earlier when she played dead on the parlor room couch, posing in the same position that her late grandmother's corpse had been placed for a post-mortem daugerreotype. More from IndieWire Here's How to Find Work When Entertainment Jobs Are Scarce Documentarian Sacha Jenkins Has Died: 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues' Filmmaker Started as a Journalist And yet, coming of age in the German Democratic Republic of the 1980s, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) might think she's inventing her girlish impulse towards self-negation when she fantasizes about lying down in front of her father's tank-sized land imprinter as it mulches her body into the earth, just as Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) — living in our present — wonders if she's the first person to be looked at in a way that burns under her skin. We rarely see these characters overlap in a literal sense, and their specific relationships to one another remain hard to define (it would take a professional arborist to untangle the roots of this movie's family tree, at least on first watch), but 'Sound of Falling' is deeply attuned to the echoes between them. Somehow both hyper-subjective and hauntingly disembodied all at once, Schilinski's recursive second feature floats through the decades like an errant thought hoping to find someone who might recognize it as one of their own. The film lopes forwards and backwards in time without notice or warning, Fabian Gamper's camera often peering through keyholes and floorboards in order to reconcile the tunnel vision of being alive with a quietly Teutonic awe at the vastness of having lived. Some eye-level shots are clearly tethered to the perspective of a certain character, while others seem to stem from the POV of an invisible spirit crouching next to them, as if assigning physical dimension to the third-person of our remembered pasts. Intimate and infinite in equal measure, the movie's freeform structure and emotional tonality might evoke everything from 'The Hours' and 'The Virgin Suicides' to Robert Zemeckis' 'Here,' and Charli XCX's 'Girl, so confusing' (why not), but its style found me returning to Edward Yang's magnificent 'Yi Yi' as the most immediate point of reference. Specifically, the character of eight-year-old Yang-Yang, who photographs the backs of people's heads in order to show them the parts of themselves they can't see on their own. 'You always see things from the outside, but never yourself,' one of Schilinski's characters muses in a snippet of the diaristic voiceover that holds this film together. She rues the fact that blushing externalizes the exact emotion that someone is trying to hide, just as Angelika — who's cannonballing into her sexuality, and rumored to be sleeping with her uncle — resents that she can will her legs to move, but not her heart to stop beating. Do our brains flip the world rightside up, or do they force us to see it upside down? 'Sound of Falling' isn't disinterested in personal drama, but that drama is reliably sublimated into the perspective through which it's experienced. So tenderly in touch with the shared but unspoken traumas that are visited upon her cast of young women, Schilinski mines tremendous sorrow from the secret poetics of girlhood; she weaponizes cinema's ability to access the deepest interiors of human feeling, and swirls her characters together in a way that tortures them for their subjectivity. The more intimately we come to understand the hurt and heartache that Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka all experience in their own ways, the more it kills us that they aren't able to commiserate with each other (the film's temporal porousness is heightened by its glancing attention to various social and political borders, some of which are more easily crossed than others). Nothing is new in this world, but pain turns us all into pioneers. If only the film's characters had the chance to compare notes, perhaps they might not share the same affinity for self-erasure. But they do feel one another (intangibly, the way that an amputee might scratch at a phantom limb), and the 150-minute 'Sound of Falling' is held aloft by its compelling attention to sense memory. As one of the girls puts it: 'It's funny how something can hurt that's no longer there,' and that hurt accrues an ethereal power of its own as Schilinski doubles back to flesh it out. Her film is piloted by sense memory, its story (a lot) less concerned with conflict or incident than it is with the buzz of a housefly, the bite of a fish, or the beat of that one pop song that Lenka and her only friend listen to all summer long. Brittle silences give way to an ominous hum, and occasionally to the fuzz of a record needle in search of the groove it needs to know its purpose. It's the perfect soundtrack for a reverie that spins in smaller and smaller circles until its attention grows focused enough to observe a single mote of sublime transcendence — and to defy the gravity that's been accumulated from almost 100 years of solitude. 'It's too bad you never know when you're at your happiest,' one of the girls laments, and it's true that none of these characters may ever be able to contextualize their emotions with the perspective necessary to survive them. But Schilinski's arrestingly prismatic film — so hazy and dense with detail that it feels almost impossible to fully absorb the first time through — keeps sloshing its way through the years until those blind spots begin to seem revelatory in their own right. These girls can only see so much of themselves on their own, but 'Sound of Falling' so vividly renders the blank space between them that it comes to feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that only the movies could ever hope to show us. 'Sound of Falling' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
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‘Sound of Falling' First Look: Mascha Schilinski's Cannes Premiere Is an Ode to the Generational Ghosts of Girlhood — Watch
Mascha Schilinski, despite having helmed 'The Daughter' while in grad school, is making a statement: Her true feature film debut is upcoming Cannes release 'Sound of Falling,' which already has critics deeming Schilinski as the next voice of atmospheric female angst. 'Sound of Falling' will premiere in competition at Cannes, with mk2 handling sales. The film centers on four generations of girls — Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka — who each spend their youth on the same farm in northern Germany. The evolution across a century of which each family member considers to be home during their respective teen years is threaded by uncanny parallelisms that lead to the question: Can memories can be inherited, repeated, and ultimately, relived? More from IndieWire AMC Will Soon Offer Half-Off Pricing on Wednesdays, but Other Theaters Won't Follow Suit Just Yet Max Is Becoming HBO Max (Again) Schilinski cowrote the film with Louise Peter after spending a summer on a once-abandoned farm in the Altmark region between Berlin and Hamburg, where the film was later set. The duo found an old photograph on the property, showing three women looking directly into the camera. As Schilinski said in a press note for 'Sound of Falling,' the image inspired the premise of the film. '[It was as though] these women were breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at us from the past. That basically gave us the atmosphere that runs through the whole movie,' Schilinski said. 'We were interested in the simultaneity of time levels, that in the same place one person does something very mundane and the other perhaps has an existential, life-changing experience.' Schilinski added that the film is 'about the act of remembering itself, about how perception and memory work' especially through subjective points of view and the bodily remnants of inherited dissassociative trauma. 'For me, there is always the uncertainty that you can never be sure whether something really happened like this and where dreams and reality intertwine,' she said. Fabian Gamper is to thank for the hazy lush cinematography style. The film was shot over 34 days on location. 'In many ways, I look at 'Sound of Falling' as my debut film. While I had some experience through my previous project 'The Daughter,' that film was the final project in my third year at the film academy, and it wasn't supposed to be a feature,' Schilinski said. 'The limitations we had to work with [on 'Sound of Falling'] forced us all to use the greatest possible precision and concentration. I had to completely follow my intuition.' 'Sound of Falling' premieres as a sales title from mk2 at Cannes. Check out a clip of the feature below. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
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14-05-2025
- Entertainment
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Cannes One To Watch: How German Filmmaker Mascha Schilinski's Debut ‘Sound Of Falling' Is Rooted In Reality
A slot in the Cannes Competition is so coveted that even some of the most famous names in film get turned down. With just her second film, Sound of Falling, German director Mascha Schilinski is one of the lucky ones, and will be setting foot on the Croisette for the first time ever. The story is fictional, she says, but has its roots in reality. 'My co-writer Louise Peter and I spent a summer in the Altmark, near the Elbe River,' she explains. 'We happened upon a farm, and it seemed like time had stood still there. The house had been empty for 50 years, and by chance, we found a snapshot from 1920 in which three women, kind of unusually for the time, were looking straight at the camera. We were standing right where the camera would have stood, and we saw these women looking at us. So, we asked ourselves, 'What happened here?' 'What were their stories?'' More from Deadline Scarlett Johansson On Why The Script For Her Directorial Debut 'Eleanor The Great' Made Her Cry: 'It's About Forgiveness' – Cannes Cover Story Croisettiquette: Your Guide To The Dos And Don'ts Of The Strictest Red Carpet In The World – Cannes Film Festival Brazilian Comeback: How The Cannes 2025 Country Of Honor Is Following The Success Of 'I'm Still Here' That, she says, 'got us thinking about the idea of synchronicity of time,' resulting in an ambitious project that took five years to make. 'In essence, it's about four girls over the course of the century on a farm in Northern Germany and throughout the process of the film, their lives begin to mirror one another.' Schilinski's film was snapped up early by the festival and created a lot of buzz under its original title: The Doctor Says I'll Be Alright, But I'm Feelin' Blue. 'We really loved our working title, I have to say. We really, really would've liked to have kept it going under that title. And frankly, when Thierry Frémaux announced the title at the press conference and asked, 'Mascha, why did you change that beautiful title?' I felt a little stitch in my heart. It was emotional. But at the same time, it was also clear that the title was just too complex and too long, and when we tried that out with friends, no one could ever remember it.' Hence the change to Sound of Falling. 'It expresses something very important about the film,' she smiles, 'but perhaps in a more concise way.' DEADLINE: Sound of Falling MASCHA SCHILINSKI: Yes, but also no. In a way it was very liberating, because the story itself was quite obstinate — when we tried to impose too much [structure] on it, it sort of fought back and so we had to go with the flow. And the way we did that was that we used images that swelled up within ourselves when we were thinking about the story. And we wrote these down and then it became almost more of an editing process than a writing process. It was a very associative process that led to this… Well, an almost impossible sort of collective memory, a document of a collective memory, a document of a strangely joined body experience over time. Or the body experiences, I should say, of the various protagonists. DEADLINE: SCHILINSKI: Well, yes, the casting process was very long, obviously. The film has a huge cast and there are many children, because there's no real single protagonist. Of course, there are the four girls, but it really is everybody who lived in that place in each of the periods we described, and there are very many. They all have their own part and they're all important in their own ways. We actually did the casting ourselves and we looked at around 1,400 girls, and that took about a year. What I was looking for mostly were faces. I searched for faces that could have been from the time that they were representing in the film. So, after about a year we thought we really nailed it down: 'This is exactly who should be there.' In the end, it became a mix of people who had never been in front of a camera before and experienced actors that we cast to make the whole thing coherent. DEADLINE: SCHILINSKI: Well, it's my firm conviction that chaos will order itself. If you put many, many people in the room, at some point they will impose their own order and that is something that I believe in and that I try to work with. Regarding my process as a director, I would say I haven't really been able to work as I would like to. Obviously, there are restrictions in terms of time and budget. This is a film that was done with very modest means, meaning, for example that we didn't have money or time to do extensive rehearsals, which for a film like this is obviously challenging. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that we had so many minors, and, of course, there are many regulations as to how much they can work. And then we had 34 days to shoot a film of two and a half hours which is a challenge in its own right. All of that was a little overwhelming I have to say, but in a way, the way I usually work is that I think very visually. I think more in terms of images and of atmosphere, and that's what I wrote down in the script, very precisely. There's very little dialogue in everything I do, and I tend to work more intuitively. I have to say that this would not have been possible without my DOP and husband Fabian Gamper, who's been part of this project from the very beginning, just because it is so image-driven. Fabian was essential in putting my vision across here, especially because there was no rehearsal time or very little time to test things out. DEADLINE: Dark Blue Girl SCHILINSKI: Well, my last film was a far smaller project and, actually, a very different project. In many ways I almost did that as a stealth production, because it was my third-year project in film academy, and we were not actually supposed to do a feature film. So, what I really did was I used the academy more as a production office of sorts. Fabian was also part of that. I and some other people, we just went to Greece to a place I knew from my childhood, a place where I'd stayed with my parents and friends, and we went there for three weeks. It's very different in terms of its style; [we shot it] almost documentary-style. It was not really a fully-fledged film production. Sound of Falling is a very different beast in that regard. But perhaps there's a connecting thread, in the way that I'm interested in children's perspectives on the world. Children, in my mind, have an almost hallucinatory gift of finding voids, of finding empty spaces with unexplained things in the world and sort of putting their finger on that, and I find that very fascinating. So that is certainly something that connects those films. DEADLINE: SCHILINSKI: Well, that was amazing. It was actually a few days before Christmas, and this email arrives from the Cannes Film Festival. I open it, and simultaneously my telephone rings, and my producer shouts down the line… We were like, 'What's going on?!' When I first read it, I said to Fabian, 'Look, it says, 'Official Selection: Competition.' Is it really that, or is it a section that I might not have heard about?'' I really couldn't believe it. It was very, very emotional, obviously. The weeks after that were a little bizarre, because we couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't tell my actors, I couldn't tell the team, and it felt like a very isolated time — for a long, long time — because I could only share it with my husband, obviously, and with the producer. We had to stay mum. But of course, we are extremely happy and really overjoyed to be in Cannes with this film. DEADLINE: SCHILINSKI: Well, my way into directing was a bit unusual, I'd have to say. It's not like someone gave me a camera, and I always knew I wanted to be a director, and then it just went from there. In my teenage years, I was something of a troublemaker and I didn't integrate terribly well, so I didn't finish high school. I just broke off, couldn't take it, and traveled for a few years. I was a little lost perhaps in those years, I had to find myself. I started writing short stories. Afterwards, I worked in an agency and that was perhaps my first connection to the film world. I worked in an agency, casting young actors, representing young actors, child actors, young actors, and I had a lot of interactions there that I loved. And as part of that, I read a lot of scripts and something that struck me at the time was, 'Well, why do they always think they need to say everything?' So, my interest was tweaked. I thought I might be able to do something with that, but not having a school degree in Germany, I could not go to university. I might've actually studied philosophy or psychology had I had the chance, but formally that wasn't possible at the time. And luckily the film academy in Hamburg had a program that I could participate in, which brought me into scriptwriting. I wrote scripts for TV soap operas — not exactly the type of thing I wanted to do, but it was useful in the sense that it required a lot of plotting. It was a good school. I learned a lot doing that. And then fairly late — I was 28 already — I decided to finally study. There was a special program at the film academy that would admit me, and it started from there. So, my directing career really started fairly late. DEADLINE: SCHILINSKI: Perhaps, it's hard to tell, I certainly hope so, and it does feel like that to some extent. And of course, I welcome the possibility for German talent to have more of a chance to be seen abroad, to become more of an international phenomenon. And what I would really hope is that it gives German film as an art form, if you wish, more of a chance to be seen and to develop further, because there's more of an audience. DEADLINE: SCHILINSKI: Well, that's a really crazy story. We never actually found out who those three women in the photograph actually were. We do know they were servants, or agricultural workers on that farm. And that's part of the movie, their status. We were very much interested in the social status in the lives of the females. Especially, agricultural workers, who lived under pretty harsh conditions at the time. But we never really found out who these particular women were, even though their stories, I feel, are part of the film. But a few weeks after the shoot, I went back to tidy up a little, put some things in order, and in one of the outbuildings of the farm I found a diary from 1910 — which is a period we cover in the film — by someone called Bertha. This is a complete coincidence, but we actually have a Bertha in the film. She's one of our characters. So, it didn't have any bearing on the film, as such, and the diary itself is written in the cursive that they used in Germany at the time, which is kind of hard to read, so I need to go through that with an expert to get to the bottom of it. I've only been able to read excerpts up to this point, but I'm really looking forward to doing that and see what might be there. DEADLINE: SCHILINSKI: Whoa. That's a question that, incidentally, my co-author and I constantly asked ourselves when we were writing this. What is the connection between coincidence and fate? Is there anything that's preordained? And we discussed it every possible way. In the end, I think the best way to put it is, perhaps there are coincidences that can become fate, but not in a predetermined manner. Best of Deadline Everything We Know About The 'Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping' Movie So Far TV Show Book Adaptations Arriving In 2025 So Far Book-To-Movie Adaptations Coming Out In 2025
