Sounds of Falling For some time Mascha Schilinski had long been indicated as one of the titles to be kept more eye among those in competition at this Cannes 2025 festival. It cannot be said that he has waited in vain, because the German director sews a female story that from the First World War reaches the present day, to talk to us about suffering, family, mysteries, of the difficulty of being free, of the difficult relationship with itself and society.

Sounds of Falling – The plot

Describe in a linear way Sounds of Falling It is almost impossible but we try if nothing else to make understandable what Mascha Schilinski has fatto, based on a script written with four hands together with Louise Peter. He transports us to Alfamark, northern of Saxony, near Magdeburg and the Elba river. One of the most important rural regions in the country since Federico’s great time. There, here we end up in a rural community, which from the beginning of the 1900s has reached the present day, a small ecosystem where you go anyway follow the seasons, nature, where you live without almost having a personal space, between rivers, countryside and the feeling of being sometimes out of the world. Shcilinski makes us know four girls, Alma, Erika, Angelika and Lenka. Through their eyes, their dreams, memories and actions, guides us in a kaleidoscopic labyrinth made of stories, emotions, of secrets and dramas, from which an ultimate will to talk about the difficulty of being a woman in German society arises. A difficulty that changes, changes, transforms itself as the rest of the world also does, but which always remains lurking, even if with a different matrix and difficult to identify.

Sounds of Falling It is 150 minutes long, it is therefore not an easy film or for everyone, nor does it want to be clear. Mascha Schilinski brings us into a world that Fabian Gamper’s photography, the use of an almost completely natural light, often blurred, give enormous naturalness to a story that naturally has only the appearance. It is often difficult to grasp how and where we are, Schilinski is interested in taking us at the distance, making us lose their faces, smiles, of different ages and eras, in that agricultural culture, where women have a central role, are the majority, but where in reality they often count less than nothing. But Sounds of Falling A story that points the finger against the masculine gender Tout Court does not become for this, the intention of Schilinski is more nuanced, more particular, it speaks to us of a world, a company, where there is no possibility for the different, especially the different from the norm. It seems almost that he spoke of the patriarchate, of violence against the body and female mind, as a symptom of a general picture marked by incommunicability, the impossibility of revealing his own thought and feeling.

A powerful film that does not always have the right balance

Sounds of Falling He has guided us since the years of the First World War to our present, in the middle here is the east Germany of the 70s, the second post -war period. Who is who? Difficult to understand it, even if there is no lack of small crumbs sown here and there, with a work at the level of scenography, costumes and makeups, of admirable realization, with which we are shown the same environment, but with the right changes, the right change of doors, furniture, rooms, stables, rivers and fields, yet it is as if we were always in the same place. The immutability is in fact the other side of a captivity of the mind, in which the different ages are perfectly superimposable, nothing changes, nothing can change. Having said that though, Sounds of Falling Sometimes it seems to linger excessively in certain moments that add nothing to the whole. There is also a writing that does not always allow us to understand what is happening, as if for Schilinski the indefinite is a resource. Here, however, it often becomes a limit, especially as regards the male characters, kept too much on the sidelines, condemned to a basic invisibility that in the long run tired.

Mind you, we are distant from a totally negative representation, in fact there is no lack of more varied characters, but it is clear that for the director, the male world is still made of hasty rationality, of selfish instinct, an inability to respect women as different, not necessarily an extension of that land that their effort dominates. There is an atmosphere full of tragedy, drama, of waiting for something terrible, that the soundtrack of Michael Fiedler and Eike Hosenfeld emphasizes, while he talks about suicide, escape, like two sides of the same medal made of despair, of an evil of living inherited from grandmothers, mothers, sisters. Sometimes Schilinski winks at Sofia Coppola de The garden of the suicide virginsbut here the European soul is very, too predominant, its nature as a semi-epic films where FlashForward and Flashback confuse, does not allow him, among other things, to be clearly a training film, a historical melodrama or other. A lot, too much meat on the fire, the characters then end up resembling themselves also in the characterization in the end, not only in the despair they take on. Discreet, but it was legitimate to expect more.

VOTE: 6.5