Sound of Falling (the German title, In die Sonne schauen, translates to Staring at the Sun), the second feature by German writer-director Mascha Schilinski, plays like a haunting dream. The film is atmospheric and deliberately opaque. You won’t be able to entirely connect the narrative dots, but that doesn’t detract from the quiet and unsettling grip the film exerts.
This is the story of four generations of young girls, all of whom spend some part of their growing-up years on the same farm in northeastern Germany. Apart from this, there isn’t a discernible connection between them. Schilinski, who co-wrote the script with Louise Peter, twists and blends chronology and plot lines. Without warning, the story moves back and forth between different epochs and through each one’s stories. The four lives eventually fuse into a precisely calibrated portrait of suppression, strife, grief, loss, and horrifying cruelty. Throughout, Schilinski creates riveting, evocative images which accrue meaning and power as the film progresses.
Like a sequence set in 1940s Germany in which a young boy is purposefully maimed by his parents (they describe it as a work accident) so that he doesn’t have to fight Hitler’s war. Or the way in which a beautiful little girl, who lived on the farm even earlier, plays dead on a couch so that she can imitate the way in which her late grandmother’s corpse was placed. And then there’s a teenager in the 1980s who dreams about lying down in front of a giant mulching machine. At one point, a character muses in a voice-over that you can always see things from the outside but never yourself. Sound of Falling is an attempt to see yourself.