In die Sonne schauen (2025) [English title: Sound of Falling]
Directed by Mascha Schilinski
Screenplay by Schilinski & Louise Peter
Starring Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Susanne Wuest, Luise Heyer, Laeni Geiseler, Lea Drinda, Florian Geibelmann, Konstantin Lindhorst, & Martin Rother.

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SOME SPOILERS!
Turn back, lest ye be spoilt.

Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling is a devastating story told across four generations of a German family shifting focus from Alma (Hanna Heckt) prior to WWI, to Erika (Lea Drinda) in the immediate aftermath of WWII, to Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in 1980s East Germany, and finally to Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) in the early twenty-first century. The four girls’ lives span nearly a whole century, stretching across time on a farm in the Altmark region. Each of the girls grapples with darkness and secrets in their family, including incest and violence. Ultimately, each of them attempts to deal with a repressive atmosphere that goes well beyond their family farm into the very history of the German nation.

Schilinski’s Sound of Falling feels spiritually connected to Sabrina Mertens’s Time of Moulting and Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, all three reaching for similar perspectives on how the national traumas throughout German history play out in the personal traumas of German families and communities. When people talk about poetic films, they’re talking about something like Sound of Falling—part Sylvia Plath, part Charles Baudelaire, part Ingeborg Bachmann. The nation-family parallel provides a pathway into the traumas of twentieth-century Germany history. It simultaneously generally allows us to better understand the correlation between nations and families; what comes to pass politically always trickles down into the families of any given nation. Sound of Falling depicts how national horror leaves individuals haunted, so heavy with symbolism you can feel it pulling you into the grave.
Sound of Falling quietly, and even occasionally cryptically, deals with unspoken, repressed traumas, from the personal (repressed family sexuality & violence) to the national (the brutalisation of German women particularly after WWII by Soviet, American, British, and French soldiers). Many of the traumas the film deals with are those of a sexual nature, and, again, we see historical sexual traumas in Germany playing out within the family’s dynamics. There’s Trudi (Luzia Oppermann), a maid to the family, who had to be “made safe for the men“—an extremely polite way of saying forcibly sterilised—and whom one of the girls witnesses jerking off her injured brother at night. Her role on the family property is reminiscent of so-called ‘comfort women’ in military brothels during WWII across German-occupied Europe. Like these women, Trudi’s viewed as a necessity in order to keep morale up on the farm and keep the men productive; this was the Nazi excuse for needing brothels. While these instances can be viewed allegorically as internal wounds within Germany, the sexual traumas found throughout German history are not only self inflicted.

In the film’s arguably most haunting scene, a group of women at the end of WWII are walking into a river holding stones intending to commit suicide, as one woman explains: “They had heard what happened to women in the other villages.” Here, Sound of Falling is calling on the memory of a mass suicide in Demmin during May 1945. The Demmin suicides were spurred on by Nazi propaganda warning of atrocities committed by Soviet troops, though this was not all propaganda since military police in the Soviet Union, America, France, and the U.K. have confirmed thousands of rapes committed against German women at the end of WWII. During the suicides, women strapped on backpacks with stones in them, many holding infants in their arms, before they walked into the Peene and Tollense rivers. Sound of Falling captures the national trauma of such events in the personal lives of the family at the heart of the film. Following the fateful river scene, Angelika’s daughter says: “Sometimes I think mom is still underwater with Erika.” This encompasses everything the film is about, how trauma suspends people in time and space, fusing them to the moments that traumatised them most no matter how much time passes.

“Too bad you never know when you‘re at your happiest“

Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter’s screenplay suggests that German history is haunted, which is conveyed on the individual level in how the family is haunted by previous generations. Schilinski relies on deeply Gothic themes and imagery to represent this generational haunting. First, there are the memento mori photos taken to preserve the memory of a dead loved one literally using their corpse as a prop for a family portrait. This is doubly Gothic due to how Alma is actually the family’s second Alma after the first little Alma died, and the living Alma, whose existence seems permanently overshadowed by her predecessor, recreates a memento mori photo of the previous Alma, posing like dead Alma on the same furniture with the same objects surrounding her; an uncanny image of trauma in the life of a little girl. Photos are a recurring Gothic image since Angelika later runs off while a family photo is taken, only for someone to remark on how she “looks like a ghost” in the captured photo. Another haunting, macabre image is a dark vision Angelika has when she imagines a dead animal in the field then lies down to cuddle it, just before a combine harvester approaches to run her and the corpse over. The whole family’s world revolves around either death, violence, or sex; the sex is rarely, if ever of the healthy kind, while violence and death permeate every other aspect of their lives.

Sound of Falling is about a damaged family whose repressed, tortured existence is a microcosm of those same qualities in Germany as a national family. One of the girls says that her mother “knows things she shouldn‘t even remember because she wasn‘t even there when they happened” and it perfectly encapsulates the traumas of modern German history on individuals; a national trauma is felt in every individual amongst the body politic, even those born a generation or generations after the fact, in some shape or form. In the film’s final moments, Schilinski depicts women and girls working in a field as reality gives way to a moment of surrealism that offers the only real glimpse of what is perhaps hope in the story: either it’s a moment of freedom for the women and girls, a psychological breaking away from the familial/national narratives entrapping them, or it’s a flight into the fantastical because reality is far too grim to go on bearing.