“With Sound of Falling Schilinski suddenly and spectacularly announces herself as perhaps the most exciting new voice in German cinema in the last two decades.”

Death and female despair loom large over Mascha Schilinski’s singular Sound of Falling, a film that spans a century but feels intimate at the same time, as it follows four young women whose autonomy hangs in the balance, and who each have their own way of escaping a fate they do not wish to suffer. As the gothic sound of Anna von Hausswolff, Lana Del Rey’s darker sister, sets in, this haunting little masterpiece has gotten you by the throat, slowly choking the air out of you. It’s not the happiest of openings to a Cannes competition, but it certainly is one of the strongest in recent memory. A strong formal exercise in which the grain in the image holds meaning and the ominous (and at times loud) sound design heightens the unease, Sound of Falling immediately pushes Mascha Schilinski to the upper echelon of German-speaking cinema. It is always a dangerous game to do this so early in a director’s career and based on one film, but Schilinski’s singularity makes this a far easier bet.

Eschewing much of a narrative and relying more on a sensory and emotional experience, Schilinski follows four young women, some children even, as they have to deal with the harsh realities of female lives, forever bound to the whims of men. The same farm, somewhere in East Germany, later eastern Germany; the same river, that flows like time and somehow always stays the same. Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka all occupy these spaces in their respective timeframes, gradually and fragmentedly painting a larger picture of generations of the same family, and especially the women in that family each suffering in their own way. Sometimes the protagonists themselves, sometimes those in their immediate vicinity. Sexuality plays a large role in the timeline of the angsty Angelika discovering the effects her burgeoning body has on her cousin Rainer, but also her uncle Uwe, who unabashedly abuses the girl’s urge to explore; the slightly younger Lenka also starts to notice the interest with which men look at her body when she unthinkingly takes off her top, and as we move back a century the sexual exploitation is more explicit, as maid Trudi is made ‘ready for men’ so that there will be no more ‘buns in her oven’, meaning the farm hands can have their way with her. Or Lia, Alma’s older sister, sold as chattel to a neighboring farmer; her despair leads her to jump to her death from atop a hay wagon.

She will not be the last, as death lurks in every corner on this farm, whether self-inflicted or by old age. Happy times are rare, usually only when children play their unencumbered games or pranks on the older family members. There is a repeated pattern of women only laughing in moments of deep despair, and fading women in photos as if they were ghosts. In a sense Sound of Falling can be seen as a ghost story, featuring the souls of women but hardly the women themselves. Schilinski likes to play in patterns, with several visual motifs repeating themselves over the course of the film, most noticeably the women looking straight into the camera as if to want to look into your soul; most often this signals a hop forward or backward in time.

Schilinski also utilizes sound cues to announce these transitions: the swelling noise of a crackling fire layered over an oppressive base in the sound design ratchets up the unrest, putting knots in your stomach as if you are watching psychological horror in the vein of The Ring or other dark mood pieces, like the films of Mexican miserabilists such as jury member Carlos Reygadas. Comparisons with other filmmakers will be thrown around: the ethereal tones of a Terrence Malick mixed with the rigidity of human darkness found in Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon is a good reference point). But what Schilinski has concocted may remind people of one thing or the other, yet her voice is entirely her own. It’s not an upbeat voice, as her topic is not an upbeat topic. Female oppression and depression is a running thread not only in the century-spanning history of this film, but in human history the world over. Her choice to show this perspective from the point of view of young women makes some of the events in Sound of Falling all the more shocking and poignant, a reminder that patriarchy’s toxicity starts young. “Too bad you never know when you are happiest,” murmurs one of the girls in the film’s many contemplative voice-overs. In a world with so much female misery, that is indeed hard to know. “What happens when you’re dead?” wonders young Alma. “Nothing happens,” is the simple answer she gets, but as Schilinski’s films proves, death reverberates over generations. After an almost unnoticed debut (2017’s Dark Blue Girl), with Sound of Falling Schilinski suddenly and spectacularly announces herself as perhaps the most exciting new voice in German cinema in the last two decades. The film has a specific wavelength, her wavelength, but those who manage to get into phase with it will leave the film eager for more from the 41-year-old German director.