'Sound of Falling' (dir. Mascha Schilinski, 2025) Film Review

Sound of Falling, dir. Mascha Schilinski (149mins) | Releasing December 5th, 2025

Content warning: this review touches on themes of abuse and violence.

Credit: MUBI, British Film Institute

It's one of the last Mondays of the summer, and the leaves were starting to fall as I rode the bus toward South London's BFI Cinematheque. It's that time of year where you can almost feel the universe wrestling between competing needs. Cold winds undercut the warmth of the lingering sunshine, and conkers lie in the soil like mines, as if to spite the barefoot wanderers who've yet to swap their sandals for Sambas.

In my own internal world I was grappling with competing ideals too. I'm ecstatic to once again be accredited for the BFI's own London Film Festival, an honour I've had for around eight consecutive years now, all thanks to the readership I've found in you. And yet, dearest reader, I would be lying if I said I was looking forward to my first press screening on this year's schedule...

All I knew about Sound of Falling before entering this morning's screening was that it promised to be an unnerving psychological horror, following women across four generations of a family as they battle shared traumas. Psychological horror is one of my least favourite genres, not because I can't appreciate it, but because I have historically been prone to anxiety's clutches. These films tend to linger in my mind longer than welcome, leaving me feeling generally unsettled in a way that hasn't made watching them feel all that worth it.

But Sound of Falling isn't just your standard psychological horror. Expertly directed and co-written by Germany's Mascha Schilinski, this two-and-a-half-hour epic attempts to tackle some of girlhood's bleakest obstacles. And 'bleak' feels like the most apt descriptor. The narrative sees its young female leads confront some of the world's most disturbing violations; haunted by suicide, sexual assault, incest, violence, rape, dehumanisation, or the ghosts of their ancestors and descendants. It's an unflinching account of just how horrifying the world can be for a girl or young woman.

I have to be clear, this is not a film I ever wish to sit through again. Shilinski's dreamlike, ethereal lens is consistently masterful, but even her visionary eye could not distract me from the fact that watching this film felt like sitting by the slowest and surest airport luggage conveyor belt, with each snailing suitcase stuffed with increasingly wretched contents, each one more violently sinister than the last. And there is no catharsis here, no moral justice or didactic violence to exorcise the disharmony. Sound of Falling feels almost despondent in its pessimism, as if the film itself surrenders to the ill forces it depicts.

Perhaps, though, that's Schilinski's point. There can be no cinematic catharsis from a horror that persists. At its core, this is a film about the violence of patriarchy, about how perversion and abuse (both gendered and socio-political) can latch itself onto bloodlines and echo throughout future generations. There is something so ideologically arid about the concept of this kind of generational trauma, which presents itself more like a curse. Suffering is depicted as something as prescriptive as fate itself, and just as stifling as it feels to endure this film.

And yet Schilinski brings a vision to her script that is as visually stunning as it is narratively bleak. This is a visually masterful film, impeccably made, not incomparable to Egger's Nosferatu (another Germanic period-horror which I was thinking about during this film). Perhaps it is in this discord where the heart of the film lies; perhaps it is a woman's ability to craft art and discern meaning from the shitty cards she's been dealt that offers hope for a new path forward. As they say in therapy, the first step to tackling something is to acknowledge it, to recognise its presence.

I'll be interested to see whether Sound of Falling will find a more welcoming audience amongst fans of the genre, or whether a female viewer might take different meanings from its frames. For me, I can acknowledge the film is a powerhouse of filmmaking while also accepting that it's simply not for me. There is, and should always be, an appreciation for films that conjure discomfort alongside the respect we readily offer to films that invoke optimism or good humour, and I do appreciate the effectiveness of Sound of Falling in that regard. But ultimately, this is a film which began to feel long, lost and despairing in a way that distracted from its message rather than deepened it.

★★★½

Written by James Green