At the German Film Festival - Janice Tong reviews SOUND OF FALLING (Mascha Schilinski, 2025)

An Impression: That Quiet Fever of Girlhood

 

        The white noise in my ear tells me I’m alive. In noticing this, I also notice my                 stoic fear of impending death, when the sound of falling stills. We are fragile as         flowers.

 

        The harvester is blind to all that lies in the hay, there is no pathway in or out. The         doe sleeps the sleep of the just. The advancing future, this noise that is blinding.

 

        The white noise in my ear rings out in the night, amplified ten times in a string of         white nights. Nights without rest…this baffling call to whiteness.

 

        We are conditioned to fall, gravity (a weak force) keeps our feet to the ground,             pulling us downwards. The elevator of life – a mesmerising slow descent.  

 

In Mascha Schilinski’s film, Sound of Falling, the German title In die Sonne schauen literally means ‘gazing at the sun’, – we feel the after effects: to be blinded by its whiteness, momentarily, involuntarily. – The film is a poetic tapestry of memory fragments across multiple points of view, of four intergenerational families in the same rural farmhouse in Saxony-Anhalt in northeastern Germany, across four time periods, 1910s, 1940s, 1980s, and 2020s.

Alma (Hanna Heckt)

Alma (a prize-worthy performance from the young Hanna Heckt) is the seven year old narrator from 1910. She lives with her sisters Lia, Hedda, and Gerti, and brother Fritz. They live in this big farmhouse with cooks and maid servants, farm hands too. The scene where Alma plays at being her ‘dead self’, after seeing a photo of her doppelganger on the mantelpiece: that girl also had the same name, who appeared uncannily to be wearing the same black dress that their mother, Emma, had carefully picked out for the narrator Alma for a special feast day – the Day of the Dead, is nothing short of ingenious. 

 

Seventeen year old Erika (Lea Drinda) from 1940 is the niece of Fritz. She wanders around the largely empty house on crutches with her own good left leg strapped up, a fetishistic fantasy of her amputee bed-ridden uncle, showing an unfettered glimpse of female desire, a dare one sets oneself. She steals into his room, dips her finger into the pool of sweat from his bellybutton and tastes it. 

 

Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), Erika’s sister, is Angelika’s mother, an awkward woman in her late 50s; who ‘does not know when to laugh’. Angelika is the voice from the 1980s. She, at sixteen, has an allure and carefreeness that reminded me of Christina Ricci’s character in Buffalo 66 (1998). Lena Urzendowsky’s portrayal is remarkable (in fact, all the child actors in this film are brilliant and affecting) – she has discovered the power of her body, a body that can hold the gaze of another, especially that of men, regardless whether they are her cousin (Florian Geißelmann) or uncle (Konstantin Lindhorst). 

 

Unlike Angelika, Laeni Geiseler’s Lenka, a twelve year old from the 2020s, also experiences the male gaze, but an unwanted one, from her father’s friend on a summer’s day under the water sprinkler. Her sister Nelly (Zoë Baier) at five years of age, often feels left out, and readily imagines her own end. Their mother, Christa (Luise Heyer) on the other hand, is a modern woman, one who knocks down the hundred year old chimney stove with a sledgehammer. Is this her way to start their own story afresh? Yet Lenka’s navigation of her own life changes when she meets an angst-filled teenage neighbour, Kaya (Ninel Geiger) who bears a remarkable resemblance to Angelika, who has just lost her own mother. 

 

Lenka (Laeni Geiseler)

Throughout the characters' voice overs, we learn a lot about their feelings, their interior world, whether they are just describing a scene, or explaining how they are trying to make sense of what they have seen or heard – there is an underscore of violence, of threat, across all of their accounts. 

 

Their story is sprung in a temporal labyrinthine maze, the structure of which, unlike a physical labyrinth, weaves you in and out of time. Remembering that a maze is constructed with side paths and dead ends too: there are no easy answers to the life that we lead. We just struggle on the best we can, turn back from the dead ends, cheat and climb over the hedgerows if we dare. But the red thread that binds these epochs nonetheless gets loosened once it’s been pulled. 

 

The idea of letting go. The seen and unseen. The blind bind. 

 

This film masterfully builds narrative as in a dream. A catalogue of moments in time: what a family chooses to speak about, the surface of it, dressing it up for ‘outsiders’, and what gets hidden and buried, the rituals, or those unexplainable private thoughts. Schilinski, working with husband cinematographer Fabian Gamper, has created a chimeric daydream. 

 

We slip into that quiet fever of girlhood. 

 

Phantom pains from a limb that is no longer there. ‘Pretty strange that something can still hurt, even when it’s not there anymore.’ Alma says of Fritz’s cries after he had his leg amputated.

 

The sullen, moody years I also lived as a girl discovering the world, and the allure of a continent that is not yours – but another’s body, another’s mind. And the sad realisation, of the impossibility to bridge the two worlds.

 

To look there, back into those memories, those blinded moments, to feel the actual weight of the emotion as you did then: a momentary revulsion, or the first blush recognition of the male gaze, the power of your own body, an embarrassment, or an unnameable desire. 

 

Erika (Lea Drinda)

Nothing about the world is certain, but only that the world is damaged and beautiful at the same time. These traces are the only evidence of our existence. 

 

Even when we ‘see’ our own ghosts – the dead Alma on the velvet settee; Lia’s sewn-opened eyes on a similarly upholstered chair; Alma’s about face turn to look into camera; the fly that crawls into the mouth of their deceased younger brother up on the hayloft; to Angelika’s ghostly disappearance captured in mid-flight at the edge of the Polaroid, a floating blur peeling away from the rest of her family; the story of eels and drowning; Erika’s disappearance and dead mothers; a river that divides the east and the west; what remains hidden, or seen through peepholes and glimpsed in the cracks between the timber: incest, girls being sold by their families as maids, then sterilised just to be ‘visited by men lining up outside her door at night’, the ‘work accident’ of Fritz – speak of suicides, and the pull of death. What it means to live in a patriarchal world, and its socially accepted mistreatment of girls. The camera cannot help but loop back round to all the haunted places, the kitchen, bedroom, hayloft, field, and riverbank. 

 

Could the sound of Alma’s hand falling repeatedly on her lap as she ‘plays at being dead’ be the beat that precedes an ultimate action? That dull thud, like the ache of a beating heart. The down beat before take off. Before that hammer blow. The first measure of a life to be lived.