Anatomy of a Fall

There is a scene midway through Anatomy of a Fall where Sandra Voyter, on trial for the murder of her husband, listens to an audio recording she didn’t know existed. She hears herself argue. She hears herself, in a voice ragged with frustration, say things she does not entirely remember saying. The recording is three minutes long, and it is more damaging to her case than any forensic evidence the prosecution has managed to produce. It is also, the film carefully implies, not the whole story.

This is the engine of Justine Triet’s extraordinary film: not who killed Samuel Maleski, but the realisation that no verdict — acquittal or conviction — can adequately account for what actually happened in that marriage. The courtroom, with its demand for narrative clarity, its binary of guilty and not guilty, is structurally incapable of handling what Triet wants to examine. And what she wants to examine is the interior opacity of other people, including the people we have chosen to live with.

The Trial as Epistemological Crisis

Triet co-wrote the script with Arthur Harari, and their screenplay is genuinely layered in a way that screenplay-as-puzzle films rarely are. The questions it raises about truth and testimony are not resolved at the film’s end, and deliberately so. Sandra (Sandra Hüller, giving a performance of almost terrifying precision) is German, writing in English, living in a French chalet in the Alps. Her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) was French, increasingly resentful of her success, and — the film is honest about this — not easy to live with. Their son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner, extraordinary) lost most of his sight in an accident that may or may not have been Samuel’s negligence.

The trial that occupies most of the film’s running time is meticulous about procedure without becoming procedural in the numbing sense. Triet keeps the camera close to faces, alert to the micro-performances that testimony requires: the careful neutrality Sandra must perform, the prosecution’s attempts to frame her as cold and calculating, the defence’s counter-framing of her as a foreign woman held to different standards. These are not subtle points, but Triet makes them without insistence.

“What the prosecution really wants to prove is not that Sandra is a murderer. What they want to prove is that she is insufficiently a wife.”

The audio recording becomes the film’s moral centrepiece. We hear a couple at each other. We hear exhaustion, contempt, genuine pain, the occasional flash of tenderness buried under grievance. The prosecution presents it as evidence of Sandra’s capacity for coldness. The defence presents it as evidence of a difficult but normal marriage. Both framings are inadequate. The recording is both of these things simultaneously, and neither, and the film trusts us to hold that contradiction.

Hüller’s Performance

Sandra Hüller has been building toward something like this for years — her breakthrough in Toni Erdmann (2016), her work in Serre-moi fort (2021) — but here she achieves something different. The challenge of the role is that Sandra must be simultaneously sympathetic and opaque, that we must want to believe her and be unable to fully do so. Hüller accomplishes this not through ambiguity of expression but through an excess of precision. Sandra is always doing something specific, always managing something, and the question is whether that management is the behaviour of an innocent person trying to survive an unjust process or a guilty person maintaining a performance.

There is a moment during cross-examination where Sandra pauses before answering a question. The pause lasts perhaps two seconds. In another film, in a lesser performance, this pause would be a tell. Here, Triet and Hüller turn it into a Rorschach. You project onto it whatever you’ve already decided.

The Son

The film’s final act pivots on Daniel, and this is where Triet risks the most and gets the most back. Without revealing what happens: the ending is formally precise and emotionally devastating, and it says something quiet but devastating about what children do with impossible knowledge. Machado-Graner carries it entirely.

Anatomy of a Fall is the best film of 2023. It is also a film about 2023: about contested truth, about the stories we tell in courts and in relationships, about the gap between what we know and what we can prove. It does not resolve these questions because they cannot be resolved. The Palme d’Or was right.