The intimate history of women in Germany in the last century in a stunning film

A farm in some corner of rural Germany is the center of El sonido de la caída, the revelation film from Cannes 2025 that unfolds over four generations of inhabitants of this house. But Mascha Schilinski's second feature (much more ambitious than her opera primaDark Blue Girl) distances itself from the grand narrative sagas that explain the history of a country from the extensive particularity of a family. And not only because the major events that mark Germany of the last century are barely intuited or are only captured by how they indirectly affect the protagonists. Above all, because Schilinski places at the center the perspective of a series of female characters who have not usually starred in grand historical narratives to compose a film around female subjectivity, also understood as an intergenerational collective experience.

Thus, this drama, which begins from the point of view of a girl who discovers, in a half-faded photograph, the existence of another girl just like her who died prematurely, soon breaks narrative linearity to advance and retreat through the stories of different characters situated around World War I, the end of World War II, the eighties, and the present. These contexts foster different atmospheres, from erotic awakening to the awareness of death, from sexual abuse to labor abuse, in a string of scenarios that seem interconnected in some dimension that eludes us. Rarely can we witness a film so ambitious and at the same time so successful in its aesthetic approach, from the captivating and unsettling work with sound to the power of the images, to the conception of its own narrative that places the weight of the gaze, on women and from women, as the key to its mystery.