The Brooklyn Rail

Anatomy of a Fall opens with an odd detail: dropped from the mouth of an unseen dog, a stained rubber ball thumps down a wooden stairway. This falling ball serves as a reminder of the drama to come—the husband’s fatal fall from the top floor looms large in the mind of any viewer familiar with the film’s premise or its striking poster.

French director Justine Triet’s fourth feature film follows successful German-born writer Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) in the aftermath of her husband Samuel’s (Samuel Theis) mysterious death. As the only other person at their secluded chalet in the French Alps at the time of death, Sandra becomes the prime suspect, and Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), her blind but precociously perceptive eleven-year-old son, finds himself playing a pivotal role in the trial.

As Sandra is interviewed by a young literature student, we watch with the eager vigilance of an amateur detective. The interview is stilted, playful, and short-lived, brought to a premature end by Sandra’s unseen husband blasting music from the room above—a booming reggaeton rendition of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.”. Comically at odds with the wintry setting, the tune is jaunty, infectious, and unrelenting. The student leaves, and Sandra waves goodbye from the balcony. We hang onto the facts of the exposition—the movement of characters through the chalet, the exact order of events—wondering which might come in handy later.

The ensuing story, co-written by Triet and her husband Arthur Harari, is tempting to categorize by genre. It has the forensic analysis of a murder mystery, the emotional extremes of a psychological thriller, the impassioned debates of a courtroom drama, and the marital strife of a chamber play. The film’s marketing leans into the mystery angle—a screen promoting didshedoit.com, the film’s official website, prefaces the opening. Did Samuel fall, or was he pushed? Was it murder or suicide?

But despite its marketing, Anatomy of a Fall is not quite a mystery. Describing it as any of the genres it resembles skirts around something essential: these genres belong to the world of fiction, but this story takes place somewhere in the space between fiction and fact. Triet began her career in documentary—with a short and two feature-length documentaries under her belt before she ventured into narrative filmmaking—and her choice to retain a documentary approach while telling a story with such a sensationalist premise turns the film into something unexpected and deeply affecting.

The documentary slant of Anatomy of a Fall is clear when it is held up against Tár (2022), with which it seems to have a shared heritage; both are tales of a creatively accomplished and morally ambiguous mother caught in the throes of public scandal. Beyond plot similarities, both films are showcases of meticulous craft, and both exude a sense of technical self-assuredness. In Anatomy, our attention jumps from one riveting performance to the next. Sandra’s lawyer, played by the French actor Swann Arlaud—with a lithe, avian beauty that befits his name—probes her recounting of events with delicate pragmatism. Even minor characters captivate, like the prosecuting attorney (Antoine Reinartz), who seems cast equally for his relentless, acidic delivery as for the puggish face of a high-school bully. At no point are we left in uncertain hands. And despite the two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the film neither drags nor repeats itself, making deft use of ellipsis. The script touches on nuanced ideas without sacrificing clarity, never leaving us disoriented or scrambling to catch up.

Yet—though there is no shortage of enviable knitwear—Anatomy lacks Tár’s indulgence in aesthetic luxury. Tár is a feast for the senses, sprawling in scope across three continents and an array of tasteful interiors, with a lush classical soundtrack and a parade of well-cut clothes from Lemaire and The Row. In contrast, Anatomy is pared down, bare. The world Triet constructs never feels romanticized or editorialized. Technology is not rendered sleek and unobtrusive but shown in all its bulk and inelegance. We see an iPad in a clunky case, propped against the piano. Mid-trial, the camera lingers on monitors that relay photos and transcripts of evidence to the attendees—they appear flimsy and clinical, clashing with the domed courtroom. Even the beauty of the snow-covered Alps, where most of the film takes place, seems incidental, the dramatic views sneaking in from the side. Instead, the whiteness of the landscape becomes piercing and threatening, a blank slate against which events are isolated and intensified.

Triet’s directorial touch, too, is largely unobtrusive, leaving little in the way of personal flair. She favors an empty score, a handful of repeated locations, and straightforward vantage points. Shots are rarely arranged with artful compositions in mind. One might even describe the film as ugly, but not in the sense of failed beauty—we sense that Triet is perfectly capable of showing us a beautiful world but simply making a choice to look elsewhere.

Given their rarity, the moments in which the artifice of the film makes itself known are striking and impactful. Almost all are tied to the subjectivity of Sandra’s son, Daniel. In his final testimony, he recounts a conversation with his deceased father. The visuals jump to the recalled scene in the car, but the sound remains with Daniel, and his young voice animates his father’s lips in perfect synchronization. The artifice enriches our engagement, as we wonder whether Daniel is acting as historian or ventriloquist. (In contrast, a less successful example is when Daniel is questioned by the defense and prosecution in turn, and the camera swings back and forth as if magnetically drawn to the unseen speakers. The pattern is persistent and prolonged, but the intent is dubious; the effect is distancing to no real end.)

Triet’s restrained mode of filmmaking bespeaks a quiet confidence in the merit of the writing and performances, which bloom to fill the open space. The power of documentary is to show us some sliver of the world as it is—and not just show, but make us see. In Anatomy, there is no illusion of nonfiction, but we ingest the story with all the intensity and immediacy of real life. It is possible to imagine another version of the film, one with expressive compositions and swelling music, which the viewer exits with the relief of someone leaving a fictional world behind. But the deliberate documentarian treatment denies us the balm of fiction, and the devastating climax unfolds on a psychological register that is unmistakably real.

The centerpiece scene is the film’s only traditional “objective” flashback, an argument between Sandra and her husband that he’d covertly recorded and which makes its way to the courtroom. In the course of a tour through their marriage’s dark underbelly, they crash through allegations of stolen ideas, negligent parenting, financial recklessness, and infidelity. As accusations fly and deepen, we come to see a harrowing portrait of a couple: a man twisted by the horror of being cut off from his own creative drive and a woman tortured by the way that two people deform each other—how the partner, refracted through the prism of the self, can become something threatening and grotesque.

Hüller and Theis’s performances are meticulously delivered, and the resulting scene is raw and gripping on a level rarely achieved in narrative art. This is a relationship torn startlingly bare—Anatomy of a Fall belongs with Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in the narrow category of films that capture the dark side of a shared life in such painful, vivid detail.