Release Date: Limited US / International Release: 16 January 2026 (MUBI)
Runtime: 149 minutes (2h 29m)
Rated: Not Rated
Production Companies: Studio Central, ZDF
Producers: Lucas Schmidt, Lasse Scharpen, Maren Schmitt
Cinematography: Fabian Gamper
Editing: Evelyn Rack
Music/Composer: Michael Fiedler & Eike Hosenfeld
Sound of Falling (2025)
Director & Writer: Mascha Schilinski
Cast: Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Laeni Geiseler, Susanne Wuest, Luise Heyer, Lea Drinda, Florian Geißelmann, Greta Krämer, Claudia Geisler-Bading, Zoë Baier, Martin Frother, Luzia Oppermann
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling feels like one of those films whose placement within a given year suddenly sharpens your understanding of that year as a whole. With its late U.S. release, it arrived almost as a quiet recalibration of 2025—one that immediately lodged itself among my favorites. Like many of the most resonant films of the past year, Schilinski’s work peers into the lives of women across generations, examining their bodies, their silences, their curiosity, and the private costs of simply existing within systems that continually press against them. In that way, it stands in worthy conversation with films like Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, or Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. All are films preoccupied with women’s interiority and historical burden, and Schilinski’s 2025 entry is no exception—if anything, it’s one of the most quietly devastating among them.
We are first introduced to Erika (Lea Drinda), through a brief but unsettling opening that immediately signals the film’s fractured timeline and thematic fixations. From the jump, notions of the body, control, and manipulation hover around her presence. Erika’s intentions are opaque, almost unreadable, until she quite literally invades the body of her Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother). Even then, Schilinski refuses to hand us clarity; we’re given direction, but never resolution. Violence soon follows—this time at the expense of Erika’s older brother—and as she grins, the film cuts to the title card. It’s an opening that feels like a warning rather than an invitation.
Next, we shift to Alma (Hanna Heckt), a seven-year-old girl whose world is defined by both closeness and dread. She shares a tight-knit relationship with her siblings, yet death looms constantly over her life, an ever-present, almost normalized force. Much of this segment unfolds from Alma’s perspective, and Schilinski leans fully into that childlike gaze. The result is a vision that is voyeuristic without being exploitative—curious, observant, and quietly devastating. Watching from cracks in walls or doorways, Alma becomes both witness and sponge, absorbing pain simply by being near it.
Alma observes abuse inflicted upon the family’s young maid, Trudi (Luzia Oppermann), her older sister Lia (Greta Krämer), her older brother Fritz (Filip Schnack), and her mother Emma (Susanne Wuest). While Alma herself is largely spared direct harm—aside from a few isolated incidents—her suffering manifests through witnessing. Schilinski understands how trauma doesn’t require direct contact; sometimes it only requires proximity. Alma feels everything simply by seeing it.
The film continues to splinter outward, introducing Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), the daughter of Irma (Claudia Geisler-Bading) and sister to Erika, alongside a more contemporary storyline centered on Christa (Luise Heyer), Angelika’s daughter, and Christa’s own child, Lenka (Laeni Geiseler). These interwoven vignettes create a cross-examination of women who inhabit the same farmhouse across time, revealing the strange, almost coincidental ways their lives echo and overlap without ever fully touching.
Through Angelika, Schilinski confronts sexual abuse during a period of self-discovery. Angelika is at an age where she’s actively trying to understand herself, her body, and her place in the world. Like Alma, she witnesses her mother’s pain and internalizes it, feeling through and with her rather than being shielded from it.
By the time we arrive in the 2020s with Lenka—slightly younger than Angelika was—we see history repeating itself in subtler ways. Lenka struggles with identity, gravitating toward an older girl in her village, Kaya (Ninel Geiger). Their relationship is defined by quiet gestures and restrained emotion. Kaya’s mourning, her body language, and her hesitant bond with Lenka suggest affection that she may not know how—or want—to articulate. Schilinski lets these moments breathe, trusting silence as much as dialogue.
The film’s sound design and editing deserve particular praise. Recurring motifs and looming sounds haunt the film’s edges. There’s a specific irritation—like the buzz of a fly hovering too close to your ear—that Schilinski weaponizes brilliantly. Silence is just as expressive, and the transitions between timelines are often seamless, hypnotic, and deeply intuitive. The film glides between eras with an almost subconscious rhythm, enhancing rather than interrupting its emotional flow.
Returning to Alma, we watch her witness pivotal moments through literal and figurative cracks: her mother gagging after the death of a relative, Trudi’s attempts to escape ongoing harassment, Fritz being thrown from the barn’s threshing floor by his parents. The most traumatic moment arrives through her sister Lia. Just before Lia jumps from a wagon to her death, she locks eyes with Alma—a moment Schilinski allows to linger just long enough to burn itself into memory. These experiences are treated with remarkable nuance: some are given space to sit and ache, while others are abruptly cut short as the film rushes us into another timeline. Either way, they are unforgettable, particularly for Alma.
Angelika’s story expands further, revealing her as outgoing, eccentric, and deeply expressive. She forms bonds with her cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann) and his father Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst). Schilinski’s visual language flourishes here—sweeping landscapes, intimate close-ups, and locations that linger in the mind even after we’ve moved on. Yet Angelika’s arc is among the hardest to endure. The sexual abuse and harassment she faces mirror Alma’s experiences of witnessing, but this time the perspective shifts inward. Angelika’s eventual disappearance becomes one of the film’s most haunting moments. A family photograph shows her blurred, her absence echoing an image Alma later uncovers in her own timeline: a home filled with photographs of the deceased, including one of a little girl also named Alma. Schilinski uses these visual rhymes to quietly articulate a shared, universal erasure.
As fragmented as these narratives become, part of the film’s power lies in the act of assembling them. The farmhouse serves as an anchor—a recurring site of joy, violence, labor, and death—while these women move through it across generations, each carving out their own narrative fragments.
Alma’s story ultimately circles back to death. She loses her grandmother, whose fear of mortality is established early on, and then her sister Lia. The family poses with Lia’s propped-up corpse, completing the story much as it began: with death treated with an almost casual familiarity. Another puzzle piece clicks into place—Fritz’s injury, which renders him unfit for military service, is labeled a “work accident,” just as Lia’s death is eventually framed after she willingly jumps while being transported to a family she’s been arranged to serve as a maid. Language becomes a tool of erasure.
Angelika may disappear, but Christa appears to lead a stable life with her husband and daughters. Meanwhile, Lenka’s attraction to Kaya deepens during a shared moment in the river—a recurring location that takes on different meanings for each woman. This tenderness is juxtaposed with Lenka’s younger sister Nelly’s hiding place, echoing earlier imagery of Alma being forgotten and isolated in a tree. The film crescendos with Nelly jumping from the threshing floor, mirroring Fritz’s earlier fall, reinforcing the film’s cyclical nature.
Erika’s ending remains deliberately abstract. Her relationship with Uncle Fritz takes on an unsettling intimacy, but where she lands—mentally, emotionally, physically—is left unresolved. The final image of her at twilight, joining a group of young women and children as they slowly submerge themselves in the same river, feels both ominous and oddly serene as the water steadily rises.
Ultimately, Schilinski crafts four intimate portraits spanning a spectrum of emotional states: Alma—young, naïve, observant; Angelika—rebellious, expressive, experimental; Erika—curious and invasive; Lenka—tentative, searching, quietly self-aware. Curiosity emerges as the connective tissue binding them all. We are invited into their inner worlds as they share spaces but live vastly different lives. At times the film feels surreal; at others, painfully grounded. Its sound design immerses us in everything from the most harrowing moments to the quietest, most mundane ones. The editing oscillates between fluidity and bluntness, mirroring the rhythms of memory itself. Nonlinear and loose by design, Sound of Falling becomes less something to decode and more something to experience. With themes of death, abuse, voyeurism, desire, identity, and depression simmering beneath its surface, the film reveals new layers with each viewing—beyond the already stunning images Schilinski captures through natural elements, bodies, and an ever-watchful camera.