‘Sound Of Falling’ Review – A Haunting, Intergenerational Tale Of Womanhood And Trauma [NYFF 2025]

Four different families take up residence in the same German farmhouse over the course of a century in Mascha Schilinski’s haunting sophomore feature, Sound of Falling, and though it’s anyone’s guess, we can safely assume that they are loosely connected. Whether that’s by blood or merely a cause of the land on which they’ve separately lived is the ultimate quagmire, but the facts aren’t entirely essential here. What matters to Schilinski is that her audience understands that trauma, specifically as it relates to womanhood in its varying, burgeoning stages, is an intergenerational constant, a ghostlike disturbance that follows young women wherever they go. It doesn’t matter if you’re coming of age in the wake of the first and second World Wars, or in the heat of the 1980s, or even raising a family in the present day: The gazes directed at you, the transformative experiences you’ve endured, and the tears you’ve either shed or held back are a part of you. They were probably a part of the many who came before you, too.

It may sound like the vague outline to a graduate’s thesis paper for their feminism seminar, but Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter capture something both startlingly intimate and deeply troubling in their essayistic, gloriously experimental film, the kind of early-career output that immediately knocks you off balance and leaves you wondering where the mind behind it has been all this time. It’s simple, really: Schilinski made her debut in 2017 with the widely underseen Dark Blue Girl – a film about a 7-year-old (Helena Zengel) whose once-separated parents reunite, causing her to do everything in her power to regain the top spot in her father’s heart – and spent the intervening years searching for what was next. After she and Peter spent a summer on a farm in Germany’s Altmark region (where Sound of Falling takes place) and spotting a photograph of three women from 1920, the creative duo wondered, “What happened between these walls in the past? Who has sat right in the spot where I’m now sitting? What fates played out here? What did the people who lived here experience and feel?”

Over the next five years, Schilinski and Peter spun the resulting brilliant web of a film that is not solely “about the idea of synchronicity of time,” but about the fact that time cares not for your conditions nor dreams, as its selfish, beastly desires will feast on whatever lies in its path. Across 155 spellbinding minutes, Schilinski charts four, each belonging to one woman in particular, though the magic to her exercise lies in the willingness to let timelines cross over into one another. That’s not to say that young Alma (Hanna Heckt) jumps from the 1910s to surprise the ever-curious teenaged Erika (Lea Drinda) in the mid-40s, nor that Angelika (an astonishing Lena Urzendowsky) – whose maturation is marred by two complex relationships with a line-toeing cousin (Florian Geißelmann) and a line-crossing uncle (Konstantin Lindhorst) – timehops from the 80s to the modern era, where Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) resides, but that trauma is a shared experience, sometimes between people who have never met or aren’t aware of one another’s existence. There are no title cards to separate the timelines, nor are there sudden black screens to warn the audience that we’re suddenly about to shoot into the future or jet back to the past. Sound of Falling’s fluidity is a calling card, a quality that is not only sure to keep one on their toes, but makes the feature feel that much more confidently assembled than it already surely was.

That same wavering sense is applied to “what happens” in Schilinski’s terrific film given that it is much less concerned with specific events that have the capacity to alter a life than it is invested in the fact that single occurrences aren’t always the things that force us to reconstruct the roadmap we had imagined for ourselves. In the earliest-set section of the film, Alma is often seen observing the ongoings around her, particularly her mother’s grief in the wake of her grandmother’s death; later, we see Alma mimicking the position her late elder was placed in when the family took a final photo together, with grandma’s cold body front and center. It’s a chilling sight, and not solely because the little girl in question can’t be older than six or seven. 

Schilinski’s intuition to have her characters placed in the line of discomfort’s fire is all a part of the bigger puzzle; these memories aren’t meant to be pleasant, but to represent the disembodied “things” that haunt us, the emotions we feel and see felt by those we love, and the jarring realization that they may say something about what we’ll one day endure ourselves. Fabian Gamper’s grainy, textured cinematography goes to great lengths to capture this sensation on film, yet it still manages to feel effortless, as though everything he’s capturing was already there despite its lack of consent to be seen. So intimate and melancholic in nature, you can almost look at Sound of Falling like a collection of home movies that no one, least of all those on camera, ever wished to see the light of day. It’s one thing to tell a ghost story; it’s another entirely to have someone watch it and to fully grasp the truth behind the tale. 

As much a film about childhood and adolescence as it is about the complicated observations young people tend to have as they watch their mothers and grandmothers live, die, and potentially move into a fugue state of existence that feels altogether unrecognizable to the otherwise familiar eye, Schilinski’s mysterious, gloomy epic can’t even be described as a multigenerational portrait because there’s so much more to its brilliance than the mere examination of youth in all its glory and grime. It’s about humanity, in an extremely broad sense, and about how coming-of-age doesn’t come about when it’s supposed to, but when it’s meant to. Sometimes, it’s stalled as a cause of your circumstances; sometimes, it starts long before you’re ready for it. Rarely do we ever see ideas – profound, stirring, beautiful, and gutting ideas – depicted like this. In many ways, we’ve never seen anything like this at all.

Sound of Falling held its U.S. Premiere as part of the Main Slate section at the 2025 New York Film Festival.

Director: Mascha Schilinski

Writers: Mascha Schilinski, Louise Peter

Rated: NR

Runtime: 155m