Mascha Schilinski’s second feature film once carried the title The Doctor Says, I’ll Be Alright but I’m Feeling Blue. The rationale behind its change from ten words to three is obvious, but it remains a telling footnote in the evolution of the freeform poetry-like narration that Schilinski constructs. The final title, Sound of Falling, is as slippery and enigmatic as the work itself—a time-spanning, quietly epic meditation on violence, memory, and the stories women’s bodies are forced to carry.
Taking place in rural northern Germany in and around a single farmhouse through the course of its inter-generational inhabitants, Schilinski lyrically glides between pockets of time with little to no warning. We loosely trace the steps of four seemingly disconnected women spanning from the early 20th century to the WWII-era 40s, the East German 80s, and modern Germany. There’s no immediate warning when these settings shift and no pattern to the duration of time we spend in each, but rather an impressionistic sense of context surrounding the events witnessed by the quartet of young women. Sunlight streams through sheer curtains, bathing a body in a golden hue, only to be cut off and replaced by the sterile glow of an electronic lamp or the cold glare of a phone screen.
Time, for Schilinski, is not linear but fluid, folding in on itself like a dream. The film drifts seamlessly between decades, blurring past and present until they become indistinguishable. This temporal elasticity is the cinematic language she uses to define her thesis that male violence against women is neither a vestigial artifact of the past nor a modern phenomenon but rather a cyclical, endlessly repeating act that mutates across generations.
Patterns of trauma ripple through generations, and all the while Alma (Hanna Heckt), the youngest of our protagonists, narrates the violence she witnesses with sobering stoicism as if the only option for the women is reluctant acceptance until death comes to liberate them. The same rooms and landscapes are populated by Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler). The same normalized spectrum of harm is enacted upon them, from overt acts of physical and sexual violence (the housemaids are made “safe” for their sexual availability to men) to the subtler, insidious encroachments such as the lingering stares, the invasive questions, the psychological pressures that invite the all-too-familiar urge for, at best, identity displacement, and at worst, suicidal ideation.
Women in Sound of Falling are never simply themselves—they are constantly placed, staged, and reframed within the confines of a gaze that does not belong to them. “People believe what we do is who we are,” a character reflects. “I believe who we are is where we are when we are doing.” This line reverberates through the film as each of the women internally grapples with their silent, subjected acknowledgement of the gaze thrust upon them. Schilinski’s camera reflects this through a sense of watchfulness as if embodying the very gaze it critiques. This voyeuristic quality implicates the audience. We are not passive observers but active participants in the unconsenting structures of looking that define these women’s lives.
There’s a long line of female filmmakers who see truth in this way: Agnès Varda, Lynne Ramsay, Céline Sciamma, to name a few. It should be no surprise that women hold this singular echelon of artistic capacity, for it is part and parcel with Sound of Falling’s thesis itself—the way women are perceived and perceive themselves is not by accident. It’s derived from a long-gestating history of male violence that has manifested across space and time with indelible consequences. For all of its haunting beauty and quiet devastations, there are also moments of joy. The temporal intermingling of these women suggests something profound in the cosmic camaraderie felt across time and space by women. Subconsciously, they see each other, and they feel each other’s pain. They share a surreal bond that cannot be described or quantified, but only felt.
Good filmmakers observe and present their findings. Great filmmakers see. They feel the pulse of human experience and communicate it to their audiences with such clear-eyed intention that their observations alter the way we interact with the world. Schilinski belongs to this latter lineage. Her film does not merely observe male violence; it confronts it with an almost mythic clarity. It is a systemic pattern that is rehearsed and embedded, training women to live in a state of perpetual performance. Every gesture, every silence, every glance is calibrated for an audience they never consented to play for.
In this, Sound of Falling stands alongside the work of female filmmakers who have long understood that the ways women are perceived, and the ways they perceive themselves, are the cumulative result of centuries of coercion, violence, and institutionalized power. Though its narrative stretches across a century of German history, its implications recede into a chilling universality. This is not simply a German story. It is a human one. Schilinski asks her audience not just to watch, but to confront the unspoken patterns we’ve inherited and the shadows they continue to cast. In doing so, we must reckon with the roles we unconsciously play in sustaining them.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Courtesy of TIFF