In a year filled with highly anticipated films, Sound of Falling stands out as one of those rare cases where expectations are not only met but surpassed. Even while waiting in line to enter the screening room, there was persistent talk about how Cannes had “snatched” the film from the Berlinale at the last minute, which only heightened the public’s anticipation. The film that Cannes claimed without remorse is not just another story. It’s a cinematic gesture that defies time and linearity—a lyrical and somber meditation on memory, childhood, death, and, above all, the female experience throughout the 20th century.

Nothing in Sound of Falling adheres to conventional logic. There’s no recognizable narrative structure, no chronological order to guide us through its images. What we’re offered instead is a texture, an atmosphere, a perceptive state that forces the senses to sharpen. Four girls—Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenk—inhabit the same farmhouse in East Germany, but they do so in different decades, in overlapping worlds that mirror one another without explanation. The camera, always restless, glides among them, blending centuries and revealing the repetitions, the echoes, the patterns that link one existence to another.

The film doesn’t tell a story—it summons a state. And in that state, the past is not what has already happened, but what persists, what tinges the present with its invisible layers. The objects, the walls, the river running through the fields like a living vein—everything seems to bear the trace of what once was. Everything is laden with presences that are no longer there, yet still weigh heavily. There is an emotional, almost spiritual labor in how Sound of Falling submerges us in this suspended time, a time that doesn’t flow but reverberates. The child’s gaze—at once innocent and brutal—is the entry point into this spectral choreography. The girls don’t narrate or explain: they feel, perceive. They move through games, silences, unspoken pains, and a kind of mute wisdom that only the deepest cinema can begin to suggest. The film gives them voice not so much through their words but through their bodies, their pauses, the emotional density of each scene. And from there, an experience unfolds that is, more than anything, sensorial—like a scent or a memory whose origin is unknown, yet which fully captures us.

Sound of Falling is also a ghost story, though without any explicit apparitions. What it offers are bodiless presences, unnamed emotions, unexplained inheritances. The women of this family—those living, those who lived, those yet to come—form an invisible chain running through history like an underground current. It doesn’t judge or point fingers, but it lets its images suggest an uncomfortable truth: that female oppression, sadness, and abandonment are not isolated events or past mistakes, but structures that persist, that renew themselves with new faces, new forms of silence. And yet, not everything is bleak. In the games, in the gestures, in the secret tenderness between sisters, there are also small oases of beauty—moments where life breaks through with a fragile but intense luminosity. This is not an easy film, nor does it try to be. But in that difficulty, in its commitment to a free and open form, lies its power. Sound of Falling dares not to please, not to offer answers, but to risk everything in the construction of a poetic world sustained by its own internal logic.

There are echoes of other great filmmakers: Tarkovsky’s material melancholy, Dreyer’s asceticism, Haneke’s rawness, Bresson’s silences, even Malick’s mystical tremor. But what’s striking is that, despite all those resonances, the voice we hear here is new. The director—who until recently worked as a fire dancer in a circus—has found a way of expression entirely her own. A form that feels inevitable, as if these images could not have existed any other way. Rarely does a director’s second film arrive with such clarity, with such force. Sound of Falling shows a radical will to create something singular, to trust in cinema’s power to make the invisible visible, to listen to what is left unsaid. At its deepest level, it is a film about how women’s lives are inscribed in matter—in the earth, in the stones, in repeated gestures, in bodies that inherit not only biology, but history.