SOUND OF FALLING

Directed by: Mascha Schilinski Starring:  Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Laeni GeiselerCertificate: 18 Released: 6 March 2026 Rating: 9/10

Last year with his suburban haunted house film Presence, Steven Soderbergh made explicit what has been hinted at in over a century of film: as it roams through time and space, silently witnessing the deepest feelings of its protagonists, the real ghost in the machine of cinema is the movie camera itself.

Directors have been foregrounding the spectral nature of cinema for a while now: think of the impassive witness in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, or the way in this year’s Sentimental Value Joachim Trier analysed intergenerational trauma as it seeped into the walls and fabric of a grand Victorian Oslo family house. Now Berlin’s Mascha Schilinski ups the ante with Sound of Falling, a film that takes a sweeping ghost’s-eye view over a century and four generations inhabiting a north German farmhouse, from Alma, a haunted Victorian waif in the 1910s, through Erika in the war-torn 1940s, Angelika living near the border in 1980s DDR and Lenka, plugged into her iPhone in the 2020s.

Schilinski and her cinematographer Fabian Gamper weave these disparate lives together through sensory echoes – a recurring photograph, the specific creak of a floorboard, or the way light hits a keyhole, as though the Bergman of Fanny and Alexander was filming Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. The farmhouse becomes a living organism, its wallpaper seemingly saturated with the stain of sadness.

The soundscape is equally vital, utilising an oppressive, rumbling design, at one point haunted by the strains of Anna von Hausswolff’s "Stranger". At 154 minutes, this  is not a film to be entered lightly. It can seem bewildering, alienating, and impossibly bleak. But give yourself up to its rhythms, stay patient and alert, and it feels masterful and uncanny. Schilinski is a major new voice in European cinema.