The Sound of Falling

Disorganized thoughts on a movie that broke me

It has been a long time since I claimed that a movie “broke me.” I recently lamented that the films I saw in 2025, nearing 200, didn’t really move me as much as I would have liked— especially the ones from 2025 itself. My top 10 list was, in turns, profound, thoughtful, gentle, arresting; but where was the film that elicited unabashed joy, or hurt so good? I thought of Anora, and the way watching that film at Cannes had me in paroxisms of laughter and delight. I also thought of Parasite, and Madeline’s Madeline, and Wolfwalkers, and Captain Volkonogov Escaped, and Titane— all films that fundamentally changed my brain chemistry, films that had me staying past the ending credits, stunned in my seat. The only film that has done that in recent years has been Zone of Interest, and even that much-lauded film was the definition of a slow burn, a film I enjoyed, quizzically, at the time, then spent weeks and months mulling over, like tending to a small flame.

I don’t really know what is that drew me to look up showtimes for The Sound of Falling. The name appealed; to be honest I hadn’t heard a thing about it. I vaguely recalled it appeared on a few top-films-of-2025 lists, but not enough to make a pattern. I had just taken my first-year students out for Uzbek food on South (Perfect Together— a delight! Highly recommend), and felt a desire to be out for a few more hours. I picked the film, honestly, almost at random, not knowing what I would see until I took the recently-renovated escalators downstairs at the Bourse.

There, I ran into Trey, head of programming at the Philly Film Society, about to introduce a different film (The Poet), who said The Sound of Falling was the best film he’s seen all year, maybe many years. He rolled his eyes backwards when he said it, in that fake-orgiastic response known all too well to the film bro crowd. “Who doesn’t love generational trauma?” I responded, somehow still expecting the film to be more of a classic melodrama.

Reader, this film, and forgive the parlance and repetition, broke me. So much so I half-convinced myself to drive two hours in the ice and snow in the middle of the night (in the end, I didn’t, and regretted it). I have so far spent all of 12 hours thinking nonstop about it, and failed to sleep well or do any work of note. (The last film that did this to me was Shame by Steve McQueen, which I saw in theatres in January 2012). So, here I am, hoping that the experience of writing about it would somehow expunge the obsession from my mind, knowing full well that the viewing experience might result in Ring-like contagion… except instead of a nonsensical and eerie videotape it’s a 2.5 hour film about death, generational trauma, pain, loneliness, and incest.

The Sound of Falling follows four generations of women living in a farmhouse in eastern Germany, from 1910 to the present. The actual number of generations confused me while watching the film, and perhaps the film’s only detriment is that it leaves the audience grasping at the connection between the different generations (after reading the wikipedia plot summary this morning, I realized I was wrong about the identities of two people). The reason for the confusion is well worth the risk, however, as the film meanders stream-of-consciousness-like between 1910, 1940, 1980, and the 2020s, with imperceptible cuts that feel oneiric and terrifying, leaving the audience with the sensation of falling into a pool of murky water and emerging in a different historical period.

What gives The Sound of Falling this especially disorienting effect is its use of sound, as the title implies. Sounds layer and recede, giving the impression of something extremely, almost hyper, realistic, and extremely surreal at the same time: white noise slowly increases and then, suddenly, stops, the way a swallow sometimes causes one’s ears to pop, and we realize we haven’t really been hearing clearly this whole time. Another part highlights the sound of a crackling film reel from a century ago, and the numerous time-worn scratches that lend the viewer the feeling of watching something from an archival reel. Ghosts, aural and visible, proliferate; a common motif is a girl or woman hovering between life and death, a liminal state that is embodied in a photograph that shows her moving, captured mid-flight like a ghost.

Perhaps part of the disorienting quality of the film, that lends it its strange, unmistakable horror, is the way the faces in the film do not look like movie faces. They are real people, and the makeup highlights their realness— they are not, with a few notable exceptions, pretty. In fact, many of the faces from the early 20th century are downright ugly (I literally winced every time I saw the father’s face from the 1910s, whose freckles, pointed cheekbones, and mustache looked like the physical embodiment of the ugliest of Egon Schiele’s men). The character of Alma, likewise, is haunting— she really, truly looks like a ghost from an old photograph— and the character from the 1980s, Angelika, has that plain-but-strong earthiness I’ve come to associate with a certain young woman from communist countries. The difference being, of course, that these women are all somehow hovering between sex and death, eros and thanatos, life-affirming joy and suicidal depression. Characters are either, or simultaneously, laughing gleefully, surreptitiously tasting the first fruit of sexual experience, or pretending/imagining death— all within the same five minutes of their lives.

The film is reminiscent of many films but not exactly similar to any one. I considered the also-terribly-long, also-German film Dying, from two years ago— a powerful neo-realist-inspired melodrama set in the present day, and also grappling with intergenerational trauma. I considered, even more, the 2018 Chilean film Wolf House, an animated film that takes the prize for the Most Fucked Up Film of All Time, and which also happens to be stop-motion animated: a film in which the Jan Svankmajer-inspired artfulness heightens rather than dulls the horror, this do-not-watch-this-unless-you’re-prepared-to-have-your-mind-permanently-fucked film about a young woman running away from an abusive German religious cult (“The Colony”) in Chile. The Sound of Falling might not be quite as disturbing as Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s fairy tale of horrors, but there’s a there there, and that there might be Germany— this eerie, war-torn place where there are perhaps more ghosts than any other, where darkness and complicity is woven perhaps stronger and in a more internally damaging way.

The Wolf House (2018)

Or perhaps the German artists and filmmakers are just better at confronting the fucked-up-ness in a way that might seen anathema to other places. I couldn’t help but imagine a film that traces my own family, and the intergenerational fucked-up-ness that probably rivals the film in its horror— with the exception being that I am probably not privvy to the same secrets shared in The Sound of Falling. In Sound, it is strongly implied that the disorder of anxiety, and possibly neurodivergence, are woven betwixt and between generations and caused by the trauma of catastrophic historical conditions: a woman’s nausea and (what modern medicine would call) somatization disorder emerge from the presence of death and guilt (in a particularly harrowing scene, a son’s body is mutilated to exempt him from German military service); another woman’s persistent anxiety, fear, and awkwardness derives from her memories fleeing the presumption of marauding Soviet soldiers pogrom-ing their way through the German countryside at the end of wartime.

I love fucked up movies that are more empathetic than sadistic (Lars von Trier is decidedly not my homie). I love, especially, the types of fucked up movies that unveil some hidden horror in one’s own life or family history, the type of fucked up that force the viewer to reckon with their own nature, that their ancestors weren’t some kind of utopian force but complex and heavy with the weight of history. Perhaps because inside of me there is some force that says that I will fix this, that all I have to do is embrace and confront all the fucked-up-ness in a lineage and have the healing process start with me. Perhaps this is why people become artists (or writers, or scholars)— that there is some wartorn, pained horror in a bloodline that needs reckoning with, that then there emerges a person, or people, who, through some accident of astrology or epigenetics have the weird tenderness that allows them to see or feel those decades and even centuries of suffering and alchemize them into something else— at times drinking their way into a stupor along the way. (Why is it all of these people are my friends? Why is it I can’t seem to form a meaningful relationship to people who are not like this?)

All this to say, rare is the film that elicits these thoughts, and rare, too, the exhaustion and clarity that accompany it. I recommend this film with no reservations whatsoever. Trigger and content warning: everything. Prepare to be obliterated.

xo-J