Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

The House at the End of the World
by Lovia Gyarkye

Sound of Falling
Dir. Mascha Schilinski, Germany, MUBI

Nearly ten years after delivering Dark Blue Girl (2017), an eerie psychodramatic story of a seven-year-old determined to keep her divorced parents separated, the German director Mascha Schilinski returns with Sound of Falling, a haunting sophomore feature similarly attuned to the disquieting emotional realities of girlhood. The film opens with a moment of startling intimacy. In the first scene, a teenager named Erika (Lea Drinda) hobbles around a shadowy farmhouse’s hallway on stolen crutches, feigning injury while an older man (Martin Rother) slumbers in an adjacent room. When she finally returns the walking sticks, she slips into his bed chamber and watches, with a cautious curiosity, the man’s sleeping body. Erika, a brunette girl with wide eyes and a reserved posture, surveys the gentle way the man’s chest rises and falls as he breathes and the fine, reddish, hairs growing around his concave bellybutton. The camera follows her intense gaze until it rests on the gruesome stitches marking where a left leg used to be. This charged but brief moment is interrupted by the increasingly agitated sound of a caretaker calling for Erika to help move the pigs. She leaves the room, a minor drama ensues between herself and this irate farmhand. When he slaps her, Erika doesn’t flinch. She brings her hand to her cheek, turns around to face the camera and smiles.

There’s a mischievousness to Erika’s expression in that moment before the screen goes black and the title card drops. It gestures to a slyness in Schilinski’s film, which is disturbed by both the spirits stalking its protagonists and the way the German director fractures time. Sound of Falling fits into a tradition of narrative cinema, from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life to Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, that abandons linear storytelling for more poetic sketches. Like these filmmakers, Schilinski embraces the mangled but seductive grammar of memory in order to tell sweeping bildungsromans. In her deft hands, remembering becomes a fugitive act—a fragmented montage of lived experiences, borrowed imagery, and intense emotions.

Sound of Falling follows four women of varying ages within roughly a century of German history. The stories are set in the same house and the first, following the prologue, focuses on Alma (Hanna Heckt), a seven-year-old girl playfully taunted by her older siblings and plagued by a healthy fear of death. A sense of mischief also opens her section, which takes place at the turn of the 20th century: The camera watches Alma as she and her older sisters play a prank on their housekeeper Berta (Bärbel Schwarz) and then follows the youngest girl until she, spying through a keyhole, happens upon an unexpected moment of mourning. She watches as her mother (Susanne Wuest) cries and lights candles at an altar to dead relatives, including a young child who bears a striking resemblance to Alma. Later, we learn that it’s All Souls’ Day, which means the entire family must prepare to commemorate their dearly departed. Alma’s likeness to one of the dead torments and bewilders her. Death looms in nearly every chapter of Sound of Falling but especially in the sections that take place in the 1940s, during World War II and Nazi conscription, and in the 1980s at the brink of German reunification. Erika, whom we met at the start of the film, is the focus of the 1940s and Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a free-spirited and chaotic teenager is the subject of the ’80s. The last chapter takes place in the modern era and is led by Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), a child on the cusp of adolescence. She has just moved into the house with her mother, father, and sister. Her story is also haunted, but less by the weight of history and more by the confusion of youthful crush.

The connection between these four women is more material than narrative. Their stories are linked by a century-old house with creaking floors and rusted key holes. In playing with time and toying with memory, Schilinski’s film also recalls an African American literary tradition, resembling novels like Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House and memoirs like Sarah Broome’s The Yellow House. Early in The Yellow House, for example, Broom writes of her childhood home, “The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives.” She then goes on to relate the history of this modest home in New Orleans through descriptions of striking old photos, statistics culled from mundane city records, and the colorful stories inherited from her mother and siblings. These details add to a communal family story, but they also unsettle Broom. “By writing down the history of the people who have come before—who, in a way, compose me—I have upended the natural order of things,” she writes. It might seem odd to compare the work of Black American women writers to that of a German director, but Sound of Falling, like Broom’s memoir, anchors history’s undulations in a physical structure, a home inhabited by generations of people. That allows Schilinski to enter the past through oblique, almost surreptitious, methods, which casts history as a moving amalgamation of life’s minor and mirroring moments instead of dramatic apexes.

Take the story of Erika and the slumbering man. We eventually learn that he is her uncle on whom she harbors a crush. How he came to only have one leg is revealed in a later flashback, a moment in Alma’s story that demonstrates a profound parental desperation. That feeling of having no other choice—of being bound by social forces like patriarchy or war—impacts other narrative threads. As Alma’s older sister Lia (Greta Krämer) becomes suffocated by a fate of arranged marriage, she makes an alarming choice about her life. A similar kind of melancholy plagues Angelika, who at first seems uninhibited but then starts to feel suffocated by the behavior of her uncle, a slippery figure (played by Konstantin Lindhorst) who makes disturbing sexual advances. She too ends up taking control of her life in a way that surprises and perplexes her family.

As Schilinski weaves in and out of these different timelines, she establishes loose connections between the women within each century. They make similar gestures or echo phrases, all of which adds to Sound of Falling’s uncanny atmosphere. Fabian Gamper’s stealth cinematography captures these moments from atypical vantage points—through a keyhole, from behind a half-open door—that destabilize the viewers’ relationship to these characters while strengthening their intrahistorical bonds. The intimacy with which the film opened, that conspiratorial alliance instigated by witnessed mischief, transforms into a more complicated truth that exiles the viewer. By the time Sound of Falling comes to its conclusion, Schilinski reveals her intentions: These women are not merely bound by the constraints of their histories as relayed through this home, they are also linked by the freedoms of their yet to be written futures.