DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. One of the best movies our film critic, Justin Chang, saw in 2025 is now in theaters. It's a German film called "Sound Of Falling," and it won a Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and has been shortlisted for the Oscar for Best International Feature. It was directed by Mascha Schilinski, and it follows the experience of four generations of women living in the same rural stretch of Northern Germany. Here is Justin's review.
JUSTIN CHANG: I wouldn't call the mesmerizing German drama "Sound Of Falling" a horror film, exactly, but it does feature one of the greatest haunted houses that I've ever seen. The setting is a remote farmstead in Northern Germany. And while there are no jump scares or bumps in the night, the director, Mascha Schilinski, is a master at conjuring ghostly atmosphere. Her camera, wielded by the brilliant cinematographer Fabian Gamper, has the eerie ability to slip the bonds of time and space, and perhaps even of life and death.
The movie follows several different characters, most of them girls and young women, who have lived on this farm over the course of a century. A lot of mysteries and secrets have accumulated over that time, and Schilinski, working with the co-writer Louise Peter, is determined to bring them into the open. "Sound Of Falling" has many intricate stories to tell and an unusual means of telling them.
The movie jumps around in time convulsively, to the point where you often wonder not just where you are, but when you are. Yet the disorientation isn't off-putting. It's thrilling. Watching this film is like getting lost in a labyrinth and gradually feeling your way out. For the sake of clarity, I'll introduce the main characters in chronological order, even though the film doesn't.
First, we get to know a solemn young girl named Alma, who's growing up in the early 1900s shortly before World War I. Alma may be too young to fully understand what's going on, but she's smart enough to know that disturbing things are afoot, like the mysterious accident that causes her older brother, Fritz, to lose part of his leg, which keeps him from having to fight. Later, in the 1940s, we'll meet Alma and Fritz's niece, Erika, a curious, mischievous teenager, whose hard scrabble life is cut short amid the horrors of World War II.
In time, we'll meet Erika's niece, Angelika, a dark-haired teenager who's growing up in the 1980s in what is now the German Democratic Republic. But "Sound Of Falling" doesn't really delve into the politics of East and West Germany. Although history is always present, the movie wears that history lightly. Schilinski isn't interested in broad brushstrokes, as a more traditional European period filmmaker might be.
She's after an intimate, fine-grained exploration of what it was like for women to grow up during times of great unrest or even times of relative peace, as a young girl named Lenka experiences when her family moves into the farmstead in the 2020s. But even during moments of seeming stability, tragedy is seldom far away. As the film darts from one thread to the next, it shows us how people living in entirely different eras are nonetheless bound by common experiences.
Patriarchal oppression and sexual abuse are depressing constants. In one chilling passage during the 1910s, young Alma alludes to the forced sterilization of women servants, a common practice to make them safe for the men. About seven decades later, Angelika fends off the advances of a creepy uncle, even as she undergoes her own sexual awakening.
Nearly all the characters dream of escaping or running away. Some experience suicidal ideation, and Schilinski plugs us right into their dark fantasies of death, whether by getting run over by farming equipment or drowning in a nearby river. These women, for all their intense feelings of isolation and despair, are not as alone as they think. More than once, the 2015 song, "Stranger," by the Swedish artist Anna von Hausswolff, plays on the soundtrack, forming a hypnotic musical bridge between different characters and eras.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRANGER")
ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF: (Singing) But then, there is something moving against me. It's not in line with the world I know. Changing the heart. Changing the spirit. Changing my path. Changing my soul.
CHANG: The film's title, "Sound Of Falling," is one of its many mysteries. It reminded me of that old philosophical riddle about a tree falling in the forest and no one being around to hear it. The similarly ambiguous German title, "In Die Sonne Schauen," translates as, looking into the sun. With both titles, I think, the film is trying to activate our senses, as the best movies do, and to get us to think about all the things that can escape our senses, all the strange, specific, yet utterly recognizable experiences that we might not notice if we don't look or listen more closely.
"Sound Of Falling" is only Mascha Schilinski's second feature, and it shows the kind of deep human curiosity and exhilarating formal mastery that makes me excited to see what she does next.
BIANCULLI: Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed "Sound Of Falling," now in theaters.
(SOUNDBITE OF AARON GOLDBERG'S "POINCIANA")
BIANCULLI: On Monday's show, we talked about an incident in 1984 when a white man shot four Black teenagers on a New York subway and became a hero. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson, that moment and the fear that fueled it never ended. It led to stand-your-ground laws, tabloid crime coverage and a politics we're still living with. Her new book is "Fear And Fury." I hope you can join us.
(SOUNDBITE OF AARON GOLDBERG'S "POINCIANA")
BIANCULLI: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Diana Martinez.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
(SOUNDBITE OF AARON GOLDBERG'S "POINCIANA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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