The cerebral thriller “Anatomy of a Fall” has a title that could be read a few ways. First, literally, it reconstructs events that may have caused Samuel (Samuel Theis) to plummet to his death from an attic window in the chalet he shares in the French Alps with his wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller).
Another is to consider “fall” more symbolically. Samuel’s death followed several years of distance and bitterness in the couple’s marriage, enough for Sandra to emerge as a murder suspect with both opportunity and motive. What caused the couple’s collapse is the subject of intense scrutiny when she’s arrested and the case becomes a media sensation.
Winner of the top prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, “Anatomy of a Fall” invites this layered reading within the framework of a taut murder mystery and courtroom drama that feels, thematically, inextricable from our moment in history despite its specificity to a single troubled and ultimately tragic marriage.
The film, now in wide theatrical release, begins with Sandra, a novelist, sitting for an interview. Samuel, also a writer, working in the attic, disrupts the conversation by blaring an instrumental steel-drum cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” (about as incongruous a needle-drop as one could imagine).
The student leaves, but the music continues. A short time later, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), the couple’s visually impaired 11-year-old son, takes a walk with his service dog, Snoop, and discovers his father’s body on the ground outside the home.
Investigators arrive and struggle to construct a clear narrative. Did he fall or was he pushed? Did he strike his head on the way down or was he bludgeoned first? Was he murdered or did he commit suicide? Was Samuel and Sandra’s marriage strained in ordinary ways, or was there a deeper darkness?
“Anatomy of a Fall” eventually gives us answers, sort of, but the film, written and directed by Justine Triet, is a journey-vs.-destination proposition, in which every revelation produces more questions than certainty.
Sandra’s eventual trial obscures as much as it clarifies, reflecting the Kafkaesque absurdity of criminal justice as much as the specific complexities of her case.
How, we come to wonder, can any person retroactively justify their decisions and actions to strangers? How can we believe a testimony when every witness has an agenda? How can a child be a reliable witness when one parent has died and the other’s life hangs in the balance? How can someone satisfactorily explain a fight with a partner to people who weren’t there?
The film’s centerpiece is a final-straw argument that unfolds both in flashback and in the courtroom via a secret recording Samuel made the day before his death, wherein the couple unloads its deepest grievances: infidelity, division of labor, guilt over the accident that partly blinded Daniel, Samuel’s insistence that Sandra (the more successful writer) stole his book idea.
None of these issues, of course, mean a person is a murderer. But like any couple, they have conflicts and wounds and resentments that are not suitable for public scrutiny — intimacies that only make sense to them, and even then just barely, and which would be difficult to explain if, for instance, one was accused of killing the other.
“It’s not reality — it’s our voices, but that’s not who we are,” Sandra tells the jury after the potentially damning recording is played. “What you say is just a little part of the whole situation. Sometimes a couple is a kind of chaos and everybody is lost, no?”
So the “fall” in the title could be understood in a more expansive sense, as political life in recent years has been characterized by the unraveling of social consensus, shared objective reality and the presumption that truth is ultimately knowable.
Triet’s film sketches the anatomy of a discomforting idea, which is that people, events and facts are fundamentally mysterious, even to those affected most closely. A couple may be a kind of chaos where everyone is lost, as Sandra suggests, but “Anatomy of a Fall” implies it’s not just couples, and that it’s really all of us plummeting from the attic window.