Film Review: "Anatomy of a Fall" and the Limits of Knowledge

Justine Triet's film is a masterful and thought-provoking blend of courtroom drama and personal drama.

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Warning: Spoilers are ahead!

I’ve been slowly working my way through the last few Best Picture Oscar contenders for this year, and at long last I finally sat down to watch Anatomy of a Fall. Directed by Justine Triet, it focuses on a writer, Sandra Voyter, whose husband dies after a fall from the top floor of their chalet. Very soon, suspicion falls upon her and, after being indicted, she has to stand trial. As the trial unfolds, the ugly truths about their relationship comes to light, causing both tremendous emotional angst for Sandra and straining her relationship with her son Daniel to breaking point. 

I was, to put it simply, enraptured by this film. It is, to be sure, a study in contradictions, at once cold and distant and analytical and yet also deeply and richly affective. It’s the type of film that slowly draws you into this world and its characters, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s like the chill that shrouds Sandra’s mountain-top chalet, slowly seeping into our bones and into our souls. It achieves that rare thing: a seamless synthesis of courtroom drama and domestic drama. 

Of course, it probably goes without saying that Sandra Hüller’s performance is nothing short of a revelation. There’s a coiled intensity to her every moment that it impossible to look away from, whether she’s having a coy and flirtatious interview with a female student or defending herself on the stand as the prosecutor excavates both literary and personal life with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Sandra emerges as a woman who isn’t particularly warm, even though it’s also clear that she cares deeply about her son, Daniel. She’s also someone who isn’t afraid to stand up for herself, whether against the prosecutor  or her deceased husband, the latter of whom essentially accuses her of being cold, manipulative, and unfeeling. While there might be some truth to this, the real truth, as Hüller reveals to us, is that Sandra is simply someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and her analytical mind allows her to see the gaps in his logic, even if it also makes her something of a cold fish.

As the trial goes on, what was once private explodes into the open in a very public courtroom, as the prosecution not only forces Sandra to answer for various indiscretions during the time of their marriage. Indeed, for me the most powerful moment is a flashback in which we see Sandra and Samuel engaging in a vicious fight that has clearly been brewing for quite some time. As it escalates, each of them does everything in their power to hurt the other. Anyone who has ever had a vicious argument with a partner and had it turn into something truly ugly will no doubt recognize the emotional honesty and authenticity in this scene, as Sandra and Samuel each dig deep to find the most effective way of emotionally wounding the other. Though they exist in the same space, they seem to be inhabiting entirely different moral and ethical universes, as years’ worth of resentments and disagreements are finally brought into the open. Samuel resents Sandra’s success, while she resents that he has had to cater to his needs and desires. Whatever love might have once existed between them has curdled into mutual anger.

This is heady emotional stuff, and much of this scene exists in the register of taut human drama. What elevates it into the realm of truly sublime great filmmaking is the fact that this is all taking place in the context of the courtroom. Though the argument subsequently degenerates into a physical altercation, Triet wisely leaves it to us, and to the court, to decide whether this was one waystation on the way to murder of a domestic disagreement that got out of hand. As the prosecution gets ever more determined to secure a conviction, they also rely on her written works to suggest she has been working through her strategies in her fiction. 

It’s fitting that Anatomy of a Fall never really gives us a conclusive answer as to whether Sandra killed her husband, and it remains unclear whether Daniel actually had the conversation with his father or whether he invented it in order to save his one remaining parent from what would most likely  be a life in prison. The power of fiction and the malleability of memory are both recurring motifs throughout the film, and it constantly reminds us we can only ever know so much about the motivations and inner lives of others, however much we might wish it were otherwise. Memory, language, self-understanding: all are far more complicated than they might appear at first. The irony that these play out in a court of law, where truth and justice are arbitrated, makes the point even more piercing. 

Some critics have bemoaned the fact that the film takes just over two and a half hours to tell its story, but for me this rather misses the point. This dilation of film time allows us to both feel and witness the gradual excavation of Sandra’s life and, to an extent at least, her very psyche, as she is essentially dissected (metaphorically) for everyone to see. Anatomy of a Fall is also one of those films where everything is laden with meaning, both explicit and implicit. Some of these meanings are not exactly subtle; many critics, for example, have pointed out how Daniel’s near-blindness stands in for our collective inability to ever see beyond the surface (Milo Machado Graner delivers a remarkably affecting performance as Daniel, by the way). The constant evocations of Sandra’s tendency to explore her own psyche through her own fiction asks all of us, but particularly those of us who are creatives, to examine our own process and how much we really know about ourselves. 

Sandra is a riddle wrapped inside of an enigma, a woman who wears her bisexuality proudly; a mother who loves her son devotedly; a successful writer who takes pride in what she has accomplished. As her travail reveals, there’s only so much of the truth we can ever really know for certain. Sometimes, we just have to live with the uncertainty. 

And that is a truly terrifying thought indeed.