The opening weeks of 2026 have given cinemagoers – or those who look left of the mainstream, anyway – an extraordinary stream of releases. With films such as Sirat, The Secret Agent, The Testament of Ann Lee and, now, Mascha Schilinski’s knotty second feature, evidence abounds that the medium is in rude health.
Sound of Falling, an unsentimental polyphonic study of one north German locale over a busy century, may be the most forbidding film on that list. Sharing the jury prize with Sirat at Cannes 2025, the project goes among four young women living, at different periods of history, within a gloomy, remote farmstead.
In the 1910s, young Alma (Hanna Heckt) encounters miseries as the nation drifts towards the catastrophe of the first World War. In one key incident, the family fakes a brutal accident that renders her brother, Fritz, unfit for military service.
During the next war, Fritz, still suffering from the aftermath of the nobbling, lives in uneasy tension with his niece Erika (Lea Drinda) and her sister.
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During the 1980s – now in East Germany – Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) worries about her misused brother.
In the 2020s, Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), 12 years old, and her sister live a bourgeois life in the new Germany.
There is something novelistic about the nonlinear narrative – William Faulkner filtered through Thomas Mann – but Schilinski, director of the accomplished Dark Blue Girl, employs a comprehensive cinematic arsenal to tell her tale of abuse, unease and alienation.
Fabian Gamper’s camera, shooting in a narrow ratio, prowls spookily down looming corridors in each episode. Maybe this really is the eye of a ghost.
A disturbing propulsive drone rises up periodically as we judder backwards and forwards between the era of the last kaiser and the era of Erich Honecker.
Throughout there is a troubling sense that, whoever may be in charge, families still find the same routes to unhappiness.
All that gloom has caused some to compare Sound of Falling to the work of Michael Haneke and Ingmar Bergman, but Schilinski allows herself a moment of woozy release – outbreaks of reverie cut to a dream-pop number by Anna von Hausswolff. The film is aware of corrupting legacies, but it is also open to the notion of spiritual release.
Sound of Falling asks a fair bit of audiences. It provides great rewards for those who oblige.
In cinemas from Friday, March 6th
