4/5 stars

By turns haunting and beguiling, Sound of Falling, which won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, observes the lives of four young women growing up during four distinct eras on the same German farm.

Director Mascha Schilinski employs a non-linear structure to shift between their stories, intertwining the lives of her inquisitive heroines into a quietly profound meditation on the plight of women over the past century.

Despite spanning more than a century of German history, Sound of Falling unspools entirely within a farmstead in the Altmark region, which fell within the borders of East Germany after World War II.

Living in the 1910s as the youngest of a large family, seven-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) is regularly confronted with death, witnessing numerous brutal “work accidents” while becoming obsessed with the postmortem portraits of dead relatives displayed throughout the house.

In the 1940s, teenager Erika (Lea Drinda) mimics her amputee uncle, Fritz, by limping around the house on his crutches. At the close of the war, she is forced to make an impossible decision about her future.