Successful writer Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is being interviewed by a student in the mountain villa where she lives with her writer husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their blind son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Samuel, who is renovating in a different floor, plays the 50 Cent song “P.I.M.P“ at full volume and disrupts the interview, and the women stop because of it. Sandra will later say she went to sleep after that. Daniel takes the dog out for a walk. When the boy returns, his father lies dead next to a shed. He allegedly fell out of the attic window. The prosecutor accuses Sandra of murdering her husband. Her lawyer and old friend argues that Samuel took his own life. Two studies on the movement sequence are carried out, which come to different results. As a courtroom film with a devilish prosecutor and a case that wouldn't be tried in any court in the real world, ANATOMY OF A FALL, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, works rather poorly. However, what is interesting is the portrait of the relationship between Sandra and Samuel. Both of them write, but Samuel has never finished his novels. In a fight, he accuses Sandra of stealing his own idea for her bestseller. She claims to have used Samuel’s idea with his consent. He accuses her of using him, she accuses him of deciding over her life. The scene where this conflict escalates is one of the dramatic highlights of the film. This ANATOMY OF A FALL does produce a result and a verdict, but no certainty. There are only stories.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy