The competition for Cannes’ Palme d’Or commences with Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, the first of 22 films that will screen in contention for the festival’s top prize. The only solely German production (six others are co-productions with other nations), Cannes 2025’s inaugural main competition film casts a dark shadow on the festival, not for its execution or creativity, but merely for its near obsession with building a world as bleak, hopeless, and desolate as possible. Focusing on four women ranging from childhood to early adulthood across four different time periods, if you didn’t know women suffered already, boy, does Schilinski make it clear.
While showing the suffering that women go through on a daily basis, be it in the late 1800s or the age of the iPhone, is a crucial corner of cinema, Schilinski’s film doesn’t seem interested in interrogating how societies let women get to such dark places. Instead, Sound of Falling is a hollow, navel-gazing glamorization of female suicide, incest, sexual assault, and just about any other horrific occurrence you can think of that can happen to a girl or young woman. Running at two and a half hours with limited dialogue, depending on expository narration, The Sound of Falling may be one of the most grim films on the female experience you’ll ever see, but it never rises above this darkness to deliver anything illuminating about being a woman.
What Is ‘Sound of Falling’ About?

Image Via Neue Visionen

Sound of Falling follows four time periods: In the late 19th century, Alma (Hannah Heckt) is a young child growing up on a farm in the Altmark region of Germany with her large family and the farm and house’s staff. Her uncle Fritz (Filip Schnack), who works on the farm, has had his leg amputated, sending a cold shiver of secrecy and tension through the household. While Alma and her sisters run gleefully through their house, playing tricks on the maids, any childlike joy is undercut by tragedy, devastation, and then more tragedy. The following period is a few decades later, during the War, and a relation of Alma’s, Erika (Lea Drinda), lives on the same farm. When she doesn’t go out to help her father with the pigs because she’s too busy lusting over the now older Fritz (Martin Rother) as he sleeps, her father slaps her with such precision that we know this is a regular occurrence.
Jump forward to a summer in the 1980s, and a teenage Veronika (Lena Urzendowsky) is just discovering the power she wields with her blooming body. She lives in the house with her mother, Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading); her Uncle, Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) who enjoys leaving his hand on his niece’s thigh for extended periods; and Veronika’s cousin, Rainer (Florian Geißelmann), who she spends most of her time with as they’re the same age, who harbors similar affections for her. Jump to the current day, and a family from Berlin is holidaying on the same grounds. It’s meant to be a picture-perfect time of ice cream, swimming, and sun, but the two daughters, Nelly (Zoë Baier) and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), are both going through existential crises despite their young ages.
‘Sound of Falling’ Defines Its Female Characters by Their Trauma

Image Via Neue Visionen 

When I say this film is dark, I mean that it makes Aftersun feel like a Disney film. It’s just one tragedy after the other, the title deriving from the multiple suicides we see of women catatonically throwing themselves to the sweet relief of death because their worlds, no matter what year they’re in, are just that grim. Towards the film’s start, we get a lot of POV shots and low angles to bring us into the perspective of these child or teenage characters, and through this lens, what they witness is made that much more traumatizing.
But as Sound of Falling unfolds, it becomes more of a pretentious romanticization of the hardship women go through rather than an in-depth analysis of how systems and families can sit back and allow such trauma and suffering to claim women’s lives. When one character departs the film forever, we never hear from her own voice the reasoning behind her choices — it’s her creepy cousin who had the hots for her, poetically echoing some corny platitudes about his experience of losing her. Just when you think Schilinski is about to deliver something eloquent about why she is subjecting her characters to such pain, we instead have to listen to meandering narrations with hollow observations that put us at a distance from the character whose interiority we should be in.

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It becomes increasingly clear as it goes on that Sound of Falling gives you all the grand movie happenings that will shock and incite a heavy yet quick reaction in the viewer, but it never makes the effort to build out its characters. There are only so many suicides, injuries, and deaths you can watch before it all loses its meaning because no work has been put into connecting the audience with the people they’re watching suffer immeasurably. There are many times when Schilinski fakes out the audience with distressing and sometimes downright chilling scenes, only for it to be a dream. This loose line between reality and dream, and the buildup to one character’s grizzly death, makes it more difficult to buy into the eventual, very real calamities that it throws at us.
Sexuality and the objectification of women’s bodies are a major component of most of the stories, especially Veronika’s. We see her start to recognize why men look at her a certain way, and it initially gives her a greater sense of power. She dances in front of the mirror in her underwear, exposing her breasts, when Rainer and her much younger cousins watch on. Despite being obviously uncomfortable and traumatized by her uncle’s leering and advances, the film’s framing of Veronika as a teenager, newly obsessed with her sexuality, with little other character development, renders its exploration of incest and sexual assault that much more murky.
While Veronika’s mum is one of the most empathetic and feeling mothers of the film, we never see their relationship fully formed to the point where Veronika is treated like she should be, a child. This extends to the whole of the movie. While there are tons of sisters, mothers, and daughters, aunts and nieces, Sound of Falling isn’t that interested in harnessing the female dynamics. There are fleeting moments of familial joy, but it’s quickly cut by someone’s mother cruelly pushing someone off a ledge. This isn’t to say that the movie should have naively ignored the hardships that come with being a woman, but when it defines its characters by that and does little to explore other parts of their lives, these characters start to feel grossly objectified.
Mascha Schilinski’s Direction Makes ‘Sound of Falling’ a Sensual Experience

Imagw Via Cannes Film Festival

While the movie’s characterization and thematic pursuits offer little for the film to feel compelled by, Schilinski does exhibit great craft in her direction. The first scene of the movie, where Erika sneaks in to watch Fritz sleep, is completely devoid of noise apart from Erika’s breathing and her father’s screaming for her to help with the pigs. The audience’s attention is drawn pointedly to Erika dipping her finger in the sleeping Fritz’s belly button, as Erik draws her finger to her mouth to taste his sweat. It’s incredibly sensual and intimate, and there are plenty more moments like this. On top of the focus on visuals, Schilinski also uses sound to great effect, adding to the sensory experience that makes you feel every small detail, from a quick breath to the patter of bare feet against grassy fields. The technical components of the film, from the cinematography by Fabian Gamper to the sound design to the sound design, undoubtedly outweigh the quality of the script.
But perhaps the film’s greatest technical strength is Schilinski’s perspective juggling. One of the film’s more compelling features is how the tone of an event or scene can be completely flipped based on whom the camera decides to follow. A joyous and silly game where one tries to cycle by a bucket of live fish and catch them starts off exactly as it sounds, silly and innocent. When Veronika’s mother, Irm, someone we ascertain has been used to feeling ignored, misses the fish, Veronika quickly takes the bike and revels in the attention. The focus on Veronika’s mother, trying to keep up appearances of believing it all to be just a bit of fun, reveals something much more heartwrenching and sad than any of the film’s more overt moments of suffering. If the film were to instead put more effort into expanding on the perspective of these women rather than defining them by their trauma, we would have probably had a much more effective final product.
Sound of Falling, despite how explicitly tragic it is, doesn’t add anything new to the cinematic portfolio of women-focused stories of tragedy. It never lets the audience form any tangible connection with its characters, and the only lens we end up viewing them through is one of plain misery. Despite an extended cast of excellent performances, from the young Hanna Heckt as Alma, whose wide-eyed innocent face makes for a particularly jolting palette to watch the devastation wash across, to Lena Urzendowsky and Claudia Geisler-Bading, who both bring a subtle force of resigned hopelessness to their timeline, they make the most of the haphazard material given to them. But, ultimately, Sound of Falling feels like an endurance test of just how much we can be beaten over the head again and again, that being a woman is hard, in case you didn’t know already.
Sound of Falling had its premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

Sound of Falling

Sound of Falling is too preoccupied with torturing its characters that it forgets to forge any meaningful message.

Release Date

September 11, 2025

Runtime

149 Minutes

Director

Mascha Schilinski

Writers

Mascha Schilinski, Louise Peter

Lena Urzendowsky

Angelika

Pros & Cons

The direction from Schilinski crafts a sensual experience.
The oscillation between perspectives is handled well.
The cinematography and sound design help to immerse audiences in the story.

The film is excessively grim to the point that it feels exploitative.
The characters are defined by their trauma and aren’t developed beyond their suffering.
Weighty topics such as sexual harassment and incest are handled flippantly.