CW: suicide, domestic violence
The first film I saw in theaters in 2024 shattered my brain and heart. I was so overwhelmed that I had to exercise afterwards in order to get a grip on myself. I love when art can do this to me. The film was released in 2023, and I highly recommend it. It is Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet, written by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari.
As I organize my thoughts, I’ll home in on the emotional impact of this film, and I’ll also touch on this film’s themes regarding truth, storytelling and fiction.
The film begins as a legal mystery, in which a crime may or may not have been committed, and a court trial is conducted in which people attempt to find the truth.
It reveals itself to be a tragedy.
First, a brief summary. A boy named Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) lives in a snowy countryside in France with his parents, both of whom are writers. Due to a tragic accident when he was four years old, Daniel cannot see. One day, as he is returning to his house after going on a walk with his guide dog, he finds his father’s lifeless body on the ground. He cries for his mom, who quickly finds him and calls for emergency help. After the body is examined by the police, they suspect foul play, and Daniel’s mother Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is arrested as a murder suspect. A trial is held in which Sandra has to maintain her innocence.
Spoilers follow. I highly recommend watching this incredible film before reading any spoilers.
For me, the early moments of the film were propelled by the central question of why Daniel’s father is now dead. I felt like a detective, carefully watching Sandra as she explains to her lawyer (Vincent Renzi) how she was asleep at the time of her husband’s death, how she had not heard the fall because she was wearing earplugs since her husband liked to play loud music. I was trying to read her body language, interpret every inflection of her voice. Every interaction between Sandra and Daniel is also so heavy, due to their shared grief, and also because, in my mind, I was searching for subtext. Is Sandra trying to persuade Daniel of her innocence? Is Daniel afraid of his mom?
However, though this sense of mystery and intrigue continues throughout the runtime, it became a secondary interest for me. I was swept away in the emotional agony of the central characters.
In the trial, Sandra’s defense team decides that the best strategy for preserving Sandra’s innocence is to assert that the cause of her husband’s death is suicide. The prosecutor asserts murder. Both sides, in order to support their interpretation of events, take a scalpel to Sandra’s marriage with her late husband, which is autopsied before everyone in the courtroom and everyone watching the televised trial. Forced to bear this all is Daniel, who sits in the courtroom and also takes the stand on various days of the trial, being a main witness to the incident.
There are points in the trial in which both the defense and prosecution don’t disagree on the evidence, but clash on their interpretations of the evidence. And, both interpretations are gut-wrenching. Called to testify at one point in the trial is the late husband’s psychiatrist, whose details about his sessions with the departed are meant to bolster the prosecution’s interpretation of the death as a murder. The psychiatrist reveals dark and painful details about what his patient shared in his lowest moments, including harsh, vitriolic sentiments about Sandra. The screenplay is masterful; a reason why the psychiatrist’s testimony is so painful is because it is complex and specific enough to feel real. The defense argues that the deceased’s turmoil is evidence of his suicide, not of his wife’s cruelty. Either way, both agree on the fact that Daniel’s father suffered greatly, and this comes as a shocking surprise for Daniel, who did not know this at all about his father.
There is another similar moment in the film, where the evidence isn’t contested, but its meaning is. Daniel’s father recorded moments in his life as part of his preparation and research for a novel he planned to write. One of his recordings captured a bitter fight between him and Daniel’s mother the day before his death. This recording is used as evidence in court.
The execution of this scene by Triet is brilliant. The film shows the courtroom as the audio is being played for the jury before cutting to a flashback of Sandra and her husband in their house. There is no filter, no soundtrack, no signal to suggest that the flashback is shaped by a specific character’s perspective. It is meant to be as “objective” as the vast majority of the film.
At the argument’s climax, Triet cuts back into the courtroom, where the jury hears sounds of hard thuds and breaking glass. The prosecution claims that these sounds prove Sandra assaulted her husband the day before his death and therefore had the capacity to kill him. The defense says that the sounds are of Sandra and her husband punching walls and throwing glasses on the ground. The film does not give the audience the “objective” facts of the violence, maintaining the ambiguity it has kept throughout.
I admire that directorial decision so much because of how this choice fits with the film’s themes of filling in gaps and piecing information together. However, I want to focus on the part of the argument that is illustrated “objectively”: the argument itself, which crushed my soul. The writing and acting are top-notch. Sandra and her husband rip open years-old wounds and hurl deeply buried resentments at each other, and I realized I was witnessing a disintegration of a bond between two people who once loved each other. For me, the tragedy arose from the fact that there was no one incident or decision that I could point to as the reason for why the marriage rotted. There was a mix of inextricable factors that caused each of them so much pain. In other words, life happened to them.
As mentioned earlier, one of the themes of the movie is the construction of understandable stories. The prosecution is trying to write the story of a murder, and the defense is trying to write the story of a suicide. One chilling moment that concerns storytelling explicitly happens when the prosecution takes Sandra’s novels as evidence of her violent capabilities. The prosecutor reads an excerpt in which a character imagines killing her husband. The defense responds that a writer’s work cannot be used as evidence.
As a writer, I was terrified in this moment. I don’t think the works, the writing or illustrations or music or films that artists put out into the world should be read as evidence of anything about who they are as people. There are plenty of other sources of evidence that could convey how a person is like.
The scene however does make explicit that a central theme of the film is storytelling. The prosecution and defense are both attempting to build narratives that the jury can find convincing. There is a brief scene near the end in which a talk show host, commenting on the trial, says that the story of a writer murdering her husband is much more interesting than the story of a father committing suicide.
In the final act of the film, Daniel realizes that the objective truth of what happened can never be found. In its absence, he has to decide which version of the event he can live with. Both versions are horrifying in their own ways.
He picks the lesser of two tragedies. He returns to the stand on the trial’s last day to provide a second testimony, saying he has a new memory to share. Daniel describes a conversation he and his father had in the car months ago, just the two of them. In his account, his father tells him about life and death in regards to the guard dog, saying that Daniel should be ready when the dog dies. In front of the jury, Daniel says that his father was trying to prepare Daniel for his father’s suicide.
The direction of this scene, however, is different from the direction of the argument. When Triet cuts to the conversation in the car, the audio of the characters’ dialogue is missing. They mouth their words as Daniel fills in what he and his father were talking about via voiceover from his testimony.
This was brilliant, and I read it as Daniel providing a story that might not have ever happened in order to save his mother.
The film’s themes about truth and fiction, evidence and interpretation, memory and fact, and the omnipresence of storytelling are so layered and complex, I am still contemplating them.
Daniel’s story succeeds. His mother is found innocent. She returns home in the evening, and the atmosphere is so thick. I was silently begging the film to stop. I was scared I was going to learn something about the characters I did not want to learn. The detective in me had retired. I didn’t want to know the truth; I just wanted the characters’ pain to stop.
The performances throughout the film are amazing, and I especially want to highlight Sandra Hüller and Milo Machado Graner. Hüller’s performance is so rich and layered. I could see her character’s complex and swirling emotions: grief, fear, sorrow, reluctance. Sandra Voyter does not come across as a character shrouded in darkness or malice. Despite the film’s ambiguity, she comes across as painfully human, struggling to defend herself while also protecting her son and the memory of her departed husband.
Milo Machado Graner played Daniel as a boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders. His sullen face and deliberate movements illustrate someone whose reality has been shattered multiple times. He suddenly finds his father dead. He learns truths about his parents that stun him. He reunites with his mother, but his idea of her is forever changed by the ordeal.
As I mentioned earlier, this film is a tragedy. The ending is the lesser of two tragic endings, but this film never intended to have a happy ending in the first place. The survivors of the fall don’t walk away unscathed.
And, I respect that so much. Such is life oftentimes, sadly but truly.
This is an incredible film.
I just saw this movie over couple of days, and came back to your article again, where I had previously stopped at 'spoliers follow' section. We also tried to play the detective like it was some murder mystery. It's interesting how the son's testimony at the end changes the.outcome of the case in such a dramatic way. By the way, you didn't mention the scene in which judge did ask the son about the following day in court.durinh the trial, where the details will be so explicit that she wanted Daniel removed, but he wanted to be there and persuaded.the judge to let him be in the court. Actually this scene kind of sets up his version of the events well, because we could see how his testimony would be so profound, at the end. Even though, at the start, when he was at the end, it wasn't the case. It's as if everything that followed, gave him more clarity of the events and what he perceived.
Amazing analysis