4 March 2026

Sound of Falling is an intricate ghost story about trauma across time

In this extraordinary film, four girls confront death through the decades

The idea that reviewers spoil films if they disclose too much plot has always seemed dubious to me. If that’s all a film’s for, why bother? What then could be the point of ever watching a film more than once?

“One cannot read a book: one can only reread it,” Nabokov told his students. Not many movies demand or reward so much attention: only the best, perhaps. The first time I saw Sound of Falling, the second feature from the German director Mascha Schilinski, which shared the Jury Prize at Cannes last year with Sirāt, it was immediately clear that this was magical filmmaking. I found it baffling, however, on the simple level of working out what was happening, when and to whom.

Feel free to put this down to my own dimness and face-blindness (if my brother wore a cap and a false moustache, I’d say I was pleased to meet him). But over its 155 minutes, the film provides very few pointers in pursuit of its overall aims as it blends different characters, stories and times. Only when I watched it again, after reading interviews with its director and her marvellous cinematographer (and husband), Fabian Gamper, did it reveal itself fully.

Sound of Falling is set entirely in a large, dilapidated farmhouse in the Altmark region, adjoining the banks of the River Elbe. Schilinski and her co-writer, Louise Peter, stayed there during Covid and were struck by a photo they found, from the 1920s, of three women standing in the courtyard looking, unusually, directly to camera. Researching the history of the dairy maids, they found one quoted simply as saying: “In truth, I have lived completely in vain.” The film delves deep into these forgotten stories and the persistence of trauma across generations.

Four time-levels are interwoven, without title cards or any other explanation to help orientate the viewer. In each era, there’s a girl confronted with death. In the 1910s, seven-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) is inducted into the death-rituals of her strict family, studying, mystified, a photo taken of her elder sister, also called Alma, who died at her age. She witnesses her elder brother Fritz (Filip Schnack) being deliberately mutilated by her parents, losing a leg in a “work accident” to avoid conscription. He is cared for by a silent maid, Trudi (Luzia Oppermann), who, she knows without understanding, has been “made safe for the men” – forcibly sterilised to make her sexually available to all at the farm. After a lost harvest, the family sell her elder sister Lia (Greta Krämer, so touching) into similar servitude to a nearby farmer. Alma sees Lia fall to her death from the top of a haycart.

In the 1940s, in the briefest section, Fritz appears as a grown man, his amputation an object of erotic fascination to his teenage niece Erika (Lea Drinda). Ultimately we see Erika among the women of the village walking into the Elbe laden with rocks as their only escape from the arrival of the Red Army. Her sister Irm, though, turns back.

In the 1980s, under the GDR, Irm is living at the now communal farm with her disaffected teenage daughter Angelika (the excellent Lena Urzendowsky), who is being abused by her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst). When the extended family gather for a first ever Polaroid group picture, Angelika slips off, leaving an ectoplasmic trace on the photo, never to be seen again.

In the 2020s a new family moves to the farm, now converted into apartments. A couple are holidaying there with their daughters Lenka, 12, and Nelly, 5. All seems well until Lenka befriends a disturbing village girl, Kaya, whose mother (perhaps Angelika) has just died. The girls play dangerous games, and Nelly eventually topples from the hayloft.

That’s just the basics. None of this is presented chronologically; one era suddenly turns to another as we go through a door. The film proceeds by rhymes and echoes in words and actions, revealing continuities through the generations, in perpetual recursion.

The camera moves through this world, as if it were searching to see, to remember, through peepholes and partial views like a ghost, active and involved. At times, the girls turn to look directly at it, at us. Eventually you realise Sound of Falling is indeed nothing less than a tremendous ghost and horror story about trauma across generations, for once not vitiated by resorting to the supernatural. It is utterly haunting and completely original. Worth preparing for a little before seeing? You’ll surely want to see it again anyway.

“Sound of Falling” is in cinemas on 6 March

[Further reading: We know everything and nothing about Molly Russell]