Sound of Falling (2025)

“I want the audience to feel the film before they understand it.”

After three years of production, director Mascha Schilinski sums up the essence of her film in this single sentence. Indeed, this is not merely a film that tells a story or seeks to be understood, it is a cinematic experiment that reconstructs the act of remembering through the senses. In the dryness of yellowed grass felt by touching fingers lies the rough texture of melancholy, in a drop of sweat collected in a navel, the taste of desire, in the warmth of melting wax, the longing for tenderness, in the sound of a song playing through headphones, jealousy itself. The film achieves precisely what it sets out to do. To say it straightaway, it stands out above all for the physical sensations it awakens in its audience.

Set in a farmhouse in rural Germany, with a meadow beside it and a river flowing just beyond, the film unfolds through short segments revolving around women from different generations. By stitching these fragments together, it captures ,with remarkable precision, the nonlinear nature of memory. As one actor put it during the Cannes Film Festival panel, in real life the source of trauma is rarely clear. Perhaps that’s why the scenes from different eras follow not the logic of chronology, but that of a stream of consciousness. The editing of image and sound reaches for something extremely ambitious and succeeds. The rustling sound that accompanies the leaps through time, reminiscent of the whisper of tree branches, also becomes the film’s title: the sound of people falling through time. Even this expression alone suggests that people do not belong to a single moment, they persist through their emotions and memories, carried on by those who come after.

Although the film’s central concern lies in emotions, the idea that memories are held in the body and transmitted from generation to generation is not new. The science of epigenetics has shown that severe bodily traumas such as famine can cause genetic changes whose effects remain visible even three generations later. The descendants of those who endured famine tend to have smaller bodies, lower fertility, and greater resilience than those whose ancestors were spared such deprivation.

Beyond science, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s approach to phenomenology also proposes that our bodies are not merely physical vessels, but mediators of our perception of the world. Rejecting metaphysical abstractions, phenomenology restores the body and the senses to the center of experience, a stance that the film embodies intensely. According to this view, the body is never isolated from the world; it exists together with its physical, social, and historical environment in constant relation to it. In this sense, our perception of the world is always co-shaped by the very world we inhabit.

If we translate Merleau-Ponty’s body-centered phenomenology into cinematic terms, the farmhouse in rural Germany becomes more than a house, it becomes a body, a memory, one that bears the traces of the women who were born and lived there. The film’s very conception begins with this farmhouse. Visiting it years later, Schilinski was struck by how little it had changed, and decided to tell a story through that space. Naturally, given Germany’s modern history, such a story inevitably evokes the question of trauma and whether it can ever truly be overcome. While the film acknowledges the lingering shadow of war, Schilinski makes a wise choice by refusing to anchor her entire narrative in postwar trauma. She reminds us that the memories that truly shape us are not always those born of great catastrophes, but rather the small, everyday moments whose significance we seldom grasp while living them. By resisting the reduction of her film to a “postwar woman’s story” Schilinski raises her own stakes an ambitious, yet deeply thoughtful decision.

From the very first generation, we sense something unnamed in the young girl Alma, who gazes at an old photograph. She bears the name of her deceased sister, but cannot articulate the jealousy she feels toward the love her grieving mother once reserved for the dead child. We can only perceive it when she imitates her sister’s pose on the sofa. There are no words for this feeling only the image of Alma, eyes closed, hands resting just as her sister’s once did. The shot allows us to feel jealousy on the screen rather than hear it spoken.

The film’s framing choices mirror the subjective nature of memory itself. Close-ups of physical surfaces  a shoulder, a palm, a scar make us see through the eyes of the one remembering. Even when we do not know whose memory we inhabit, the perspective allows us to merge with the one who lived it. Some scenes bring with them the scent of the place, the warmth of a light, the rhythm of a breath. Erika’s forbidden desire for her uncle, for example, is conveyed through the taste of sweat in his navel — an unspoken, tasted desire. Such sensory–emotional correspondences appear throughout the film. Likewise, Alma’s inexpressible jealousy, first revealed through her body’s posture, resurfaces in new forms across generations, each time recognized by the viewer with the freshness of its first appearance.

The film’s web of senses and emotions creates a leitmotif of repetition unconscious cycles replayed across time yet the viewer, guided by the film’s gradual unveiling, remembers each of them one by one. By making us relive the act of remembering in a way true to its very nature, the film’s seemingly complex editing proves essential to its effect. Even when time fractures, the film does not lose its audience, instead it clings to their sensory memory.

And when we return to each frame he rustle of leaves, the muffled sound beneath water, the dry grass, the warmth of melting wax we find that the feelings reawaken with the same immediacy. Watching this film, one begins to wonder: doesn’t all this make you believe, if only for a moment, in the endurance of things that will never vanish?