Sound of Falling: there’s no escape from patriarchy in this exquisitely crafted tale of German women through time

Here at last is the cinematic equivalent of Eimear McBride’s eviscerating 2013 novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing: Sound of Falling is a furious, fragmented piece of filmmaking in which the violence wrought on the female body explodes formal convention, leaving us scrambling to make sense out of its scattered pieces.

Director Mascha Schilinski and editor Evelyn Rack work unapologetically in a tradition of European modernism that responds to the horrors of the 20th century by abandoning any attempt at transparent representation. And rather as McBride updates the stream-of-consciousness soliloquy Joyce writes for Molly Bloom, turning an endless torrent of words into a barrage of staccato sentences, so Schilinski and Rack take Chantal Akerman’s relentless long takes and transmute them into a series of syncopated scenes from the life of not one, but four young German women. To paraphrase Anne Enright on McBride, you can almost hear the blows in the rhythm of the edit.

Any effort to synthesise the events of Sound of Falling automatically undermines its elegantly fraught composition. Suffice to say it centres around a large farmstead in the Altmark region of Germany on the banks of the river Elbe which, over the course of a century, passes between several families. The splintered narrative focuses on the daughters of these families at different periods in its history; Schilinski and Rack cut between periods in a manner that feels precise yet mysterious, suggestive of a sinister connection between the girls that the viewer is anxious to uncover. In the early 1940s, adolescent Erika (Lea Drinda) binds her leg like a piece of meat in imitation of her amputee uncle. At the onset of WWI, seven-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) compulsively attempts to recreate a photo of her mother with a dead child that bears an uncanny resemblance to her. Contemporary teen Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), visiting the farmhouse with her Berliner parents and younger sister, develops a morbid fascination with neighbour Kaya (Ninel Geiger), whose mother has died of lung cancer. In the 1980s GDR, older teen Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) has a queasy, quasi-incestuous relationship with two of her male relatives.

As the film swerves between intersecting glimpses into the girls’ lives, the viewer falls through history like the doomed time traveller in La Jetée (1962), entering scenes in media res and exiting abruptly, left in frightening, vulnerable suspense. Far from offering breathing room between the different narratives, these cuts leave us choked, gasping for air: appropriate enough, since we return frequently, inexplicably to the river, and a series of underwater shots through which sharp-toothed and slimy eels undulate. There are flies everywhere, worrying at dusky eyelashes and exposed skin; now and then the sound design ratchets up their incessant rumble to deafening point. Critics have compared Sound of Falling to the work of Jane Campion and Michael Haneke. I was put in mind of David Lynch, Jessica Hausner and Lucile Hadžihalilović.

Cinematographer Fabian Gamper deploys the cinematic vocabulary of haunting to imply the presence of a spectral observer. The handheld camera bobs and floats, untethered from any set point of view. Sometimes it pushes in close to people and objects with ominous attentiveness. Sometimes it drifts up and away with a freedom its subjects, boxed into their settings by Gamper’s Academy-ratio frame, can only yearn for. The uncanny effect is heightened by the filmmakers’ decision to switch between different lenses and deploy a pinhole camera, lending a grainy, submerged quality to certain scenes, and blurring the borders between perception, memory and imagination. Twice, we watch through our fingers as a character dies by suicide (in one instance Schilinski pays tribute to Bresson’s Mouchette, 1967, another film about the cruelty wrought on young girls), only for the sequence to replay later with a different outcome.

Since this is a film about the silencing of women, the four leads have little dialogue, evoking their cloistered inner worlds through beautifully gestural performances. They sleepwalk through their lives, only their frantically darting eyes betraying the secret swirling thoughts they carry. “How long can you act happy without anyone noticing?”, one wonders. Schilinski gives them speech through a series of voiceovers, unattributed to any one character, that recount the terrible stories of their sisters, aunts, maids, mothers and friends. The effect is of a Greek chorus, telling of girls sold into servitude, forcibly sterilised so they might service the needs of their male co-workers without the inconvenience of unwanted pregnancies. Of girls who are slapped, beaten, harassed, raped. Of girls who will weight their pockets with rocks and step into the murky Elbe rather than endure another day of this beastly world (the spectre of Virginia Woolf looms large).

In one especially eerie moment, a young woman steps out of a group photo, being captured on Polaroid, and simply disappears, her fading presence registering as a floating blur on the developed snapshot. Schilinski is clear-eyed about the social and historical forces that shape the mistreatment of the girls, even as she situates the domestic space, the family in particular, as the cradle of violence. As we return time and again to the kitchen, the hayloft, the riverbank, the bedroom, certain movements and motifs recur, most strikingly the family portrait. One wonders if these women are cursed. Certainly, the film’s looping structure undoes any illusion of progress. It’s an extraordinary thing, to move from the story of a holidaying teen in contemporary Europe to an indentured servant one century earlier and through form alone draw an equivalence between them. Lenka, Erika, Alma and Angelika are caught in a relentless cycle of patriarchal brutality from which there is no escape. Nothing bloody changes.

In her 2021 book On Violence and on Violence Against Women, Jacqueline Rose described the state of “exhilaration but also shock” that arose from her immersion in female suffering while researching the life of Sylvia Plath. I left Sound of Falling with a similar feeling. It is difficult to watch, but for all the right reasons. Crafted with exquisite care, by a director and crew in full control of their material, it is a brilliant, horrifying, breathtaking piece of filmmaking, that left me weeping for the future of our daughters and hopeful for the future of cinema.

► Sound of Falling is in UK cinemas 6 March.