14/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: With her second feature, German director Mascha Schilinski broadens the possibilities of period filmmaking

For Germany’s Mascha Schilinski, film is both a mirror and a portal to a world of feelings. Even if she’s only made two features thus far, her exceptional approach to storytelling makes her name stand out. As part of the Competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, her sophomore film, Sound of Falling [+see also:
trailer
film profile], will surely shine a spotlight on the German director now more than before, when her 2017 debut, Dark Blue Girl [+see also:
trailer
film profile], played in the Berlinale’s national sidebar Perspektive Deutsches Kino. A lot hinges on every single image in Sound of Falling, with a narrative uniting four girls across decades in a single courtyard. It is also a brilliant example of using formalistic restraint to deliver a hushed drama on an epic scale, where each scene can equally be the first and last one.

It’s not like the setting itself is particularly beautiful: the film takes place in the rooms, corridors and courtyard of a farmhouse in rural Altmark (“the cradle of Prussia”) over the course of more than a century, up until the present day. Alma (Hanna Heckt), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) and Erika (Lea Drinda) never get to meet, but the building and the land connect them. Yes, Sound of Falling is a ghostly film, where everything is haunted: the nooks and crannies of the house, the inner cloister, the River Elbe nearby, as well as history and filmmaking as an art form – all of these are present in the unnerving atmosphere, born of the unintentional (at least at first) collaboration between the director and co-writer Louise Peter.

To ground the movie’s sombre mood, Schilinski once again works with a sizeable sound-design team, including gothic-meets-classical artist Anna von Hausswolff (Personal Shopper [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Artemio Benki
interview: Olivier Assayas
film profile]) as composer, while her usual cinematographer, Fabian Gamper, brings out the spectral in various visceral images, like that of an amputated leg, a person vomiting or a body laid to rest. The notion of phantom pain comes up again and again, and it serves as a strong metaphor for political and social oppression – mostly in relation to women. Fittingly, Gamper shows us the insides of the house – sometimes ornate, impeccably kept by the help, or dilapidated and awaiting modernisation – as his camera depicts the bodies of women, young and old.

Sound of Falling takes you through the looking glass and pulls you back, making the question of “who’s looking?” irrelevant by having point-of-view shots occasionally puncture the more “objective” visual language in sometimes jarring ways. Yet, to describe the camerawork as “subjective” doesn’t quite capture the push and pull between aesthetics and plot. For example, there are a few scenes where direct address pierces the veil of a period drama: the girls lock eyes with the camera (and with the viewer), and the frame stands still. Such compositions exude all the eeriness of early photographs where people could easily believe that the camera lens could imprison one’s soul. For such an assured critics’ favourite that pays so much attention to surfaces, Sound of Falling defeats the usual superficiality-related objection levelled at the extensive use of formalism, since it treats surfaces as the outer layer of a living, breathing organism – be it a woman or a house.

Sound of Falling was produced by Studio Zentral (Germany) and ZDF Germany, while mk2 handles its worldwide sales.