Sound of Falling
Updated: Dec 31, 2025
A sublime ghost story of intergenerational trauma and yearning for the abyss.
Interceding timelines are woven together for a sensorial experience of the unseen lives in four generations of women who all inhabit a farm in Altmark, Germany. This labyrinthine web of memory unearths pre and post war devastation, sexual awakenings, neglect and obsession and the familiar spectre of death all in the span of a century.
Sound of Falling or ‘In die Sonne schauen’ - ‘Looking into the Sun’ flows like an entrancing tone poem, unfolding a living ghost story in past, present and future simultaneously in the mental and emotional constraints of womanhood. The camera drifts around the farmhouse like a wandering spirit lurking in the corners and cracks protruding each character where they will all at one precise moment turn their gaze back to the camera as it rises above them like the sun. Cross-cutting between each period, director Mascha Schilinski creates an elegiac mosaic of shared consciousness between each of the woman all afflicted by the harsh existence of their times. Visions of death, desire, and torment loom over the everlasting structure of the farmhouse in palpable connections taking shape in the form of the buzzing of a fly, the volatile bite of an eel, the haunting gush of the wind, and the blinding glare of the sunlight. Taking inspiration from a real farm in rural German, Schilinski utilised aged photographs and artifacts from the dwelling to forge her own stream of colliding echoes similar to the style of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) and the more recent and underappreciated All Dirty Roads Taste of Salt (2023), with a Bergman-esc psychological study.
"How can you act happy without anyone noticing?"
Alma (Hanna Heckt) the youngest girl amongst the ensemble lives a simple life of intimate candle lit dinners and playful chases through a maze of hay with her deeply religious family. After a death in the family, Alma develops a peculiar interest in the photograph of a deceased little girl who she eerily resembles, while a cruel reality is forming during the beginnings of the first world war, where the maturing daughters on the farm are ritualistically 'adjusted' for the safety of the venereal services they are must endure for the men in the community. Minor pains become a relief against the vast suffering to come, when one of the boys on the farm is forcibly amputated by their mother to prevent his eligibility for the draft. A generation later, that same boy grows up to be the uncle of Erika (Lea Drinda) who develops an infatuation with her amputee uncle, so much so they she attempts to imitate his experience by walking with crutches. Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) lives in the more liberated era of the 80s, where she can gracefully wonder the fields as often as she likes, and carelessly indulge in her blossoming sexuality. Attracting the attention of her cousin and slippery uncle, Angelika's fiery and free spirited nature seems harmless until the judgemental community around her silently condemns her behaviour. Cut to the 21st century, and a new family now living on the farm starting a new life where one of the daughters, Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) quietly reflects by the river as she repeatedly listens to 'Stranger' by Anna Von Hausswolff and befriends the rebellious next door neighbour girl who her parents take a favouring interest in.
In these hidden moments of solitude the phantoms of the past are always present and transpire in each of the women's lives, only to be ever fully seen by us. The girls are bonded in ponderous internal monologues where they question the very fabric of their minds and bodies and their inescapable paths. Tactile images bleed into one another where each woman at one point or another have a varied response of saying: "It's warm". What is the sound of falling? It is the sound of nothing, the sound of death itself, it is the spirit that rumbles and stalks around the farm until it strikes in unexpected places. The richly layered sound design transforms the smallest of household noises into paranormal omens traversing across the timelines.
It's a devastatingly nihilistic portrait of womanhood, as Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka experience a collective vanity for existence at the cost of their femineity. Schilinski's film is an astonishing tapestry to behold in the feat of its scale and the haunting outlook of its characters, full of mystery and powerfully singular images, a dreamy and raw maze of thought and feeling which is something only pure cinema as this can unlock.
“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.” ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Afterthought
What are we to take from this offering? Schilinski's work is a doorway to the past but an aching cry against the concealed misery of life. Sound of Falling could easily belong to a train of thought that King Solomon wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes. Everything is meaningless in the absence of a loving God, where the sweet release of death is a comforting promise. Of course we must be rejoicing in the truth that Jesus gives us eternal life after death, where we will be free from this agony, but God still hears our woes no matter how far fallen we feel in this life.
"So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless."-Ecclesiastes 2:17- 19
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