Format: Streaming video from Hulu on rockin’ flatscreen.
Sandra Hüller had a really good 2023. She was one of the stars of The Zone of Interest, dwhich was nominated for Best Picture and won Best Foreign Language Feature. She also starred in Anatomy of a Fall, which was also nominated for Best Picture. In 2017, Michael Stuhlbarg was in three of the nine Best Picture nominees—a damn solid year. I think Hüller might have had the better year. While she was in 20% of the Best Picture nominees rather than 33%, she also managed a Best Actress nomination.
The inciting incident here is the fall of the title. Novelist Sandra Voyter (Hüller) has to postpone an interview with a student because her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) starts playing music extremely loud. Their vision-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes his dog Snoop out for a walk. When he returns, he finds his father’s body on the ground, evidently having fallen from the third story of their chalet.
Of course, Sandra was the only person home at the time, and soon we discover that their marriage had a number of serious problems. She had been unfaithful to him in the past, he resented her success, and they both held him responsible for the accident that damaged their son’s vision. She also claims that he attempted to kill himself six months prior, but the pills he took made him sick, and his shame caused her to keep this a secret.
Most of the movie concerns the trial, and the trial brings out all of the problems of the marriage and all of the possible problems with her defense. We learn all of the dirt and all of the holes in the story that she is telling. Her lawyer (Swann Arlaud) is adept, but the prosecuting attorney (Antoine Reinartz) is equally adept. And, of course, young Daniel is going to be caught up in the center of this. To prevent him from being unduly influenced by his mother, he is assigned a sort of guardian (Jehnny Beth) to ensure that she does not.
The centerpiece of the case against comes in the form of an audio recording made by Samuel the day before he died. As it happens, he had been recording conversations, either with the knowledge of the other people or not, as a way to help with his own writing. In this case, the argument he records is one that gets dark and painful quickly, and ends in physical violence between the two of them. There are, of course, a lot of interpretations of what happened, the most interesting being that he picked the fight specifically as a way to use it in what he was working on.
The argument is the centerpiece, though, because it brings up everything that is wrong with their relationship. He accuses her of stealing part of a book he was working on for one of hers; she claims that he gave her permission, but would bring this up during fights as a way to attack her. He mentions her infidelity; she responds by saying it happened only with one person that he didn’t know about—her earlier infidelities were admitted when they happened. The interpretations are various and none of them are good.
Sandra Hüller’s performance is central to the film, and she’s the main reason to watch it. In truth, all of the performances are good. Milo Machado-Graner is one of the best parts of the film. He’s entirely believable throughout, and since he appears to have had to wear contact lenses to give his eyes the right quality to look essentially blind, he’s acting through the equivalent of physical adversity. Hüller, though, is as good as you can be, because she has to walk a very specific line for this film. Sandra needs to be protesting her guilt, demanding that she be taken seriously, and also be essentially an unlikable person. We don’t root for her at all. There’s certainly a desire for justice to be done and for the correct conclusion to be reached, but, at least for me, there’s nothing here that was emotional in that desire. Sandra is not a pleasant or nice person and might not even be a decent one.
One of my current hobby horses is that movies have gotten too damned long again and need to start trimming themselves down. Anatomy of a Fall is just a shade over 150 minutes, but this is a complaint I have less about this film than I do with others. We need this to play out slowly—we need the information to unfold over time so that we understand exactly how the case works, and how a casual remark or a thoughtless habit can look like guilt or innocence. Justine Triet handles all of this adeptly, and this story is told as well as any courtroom drama I’ve seen. It avoids the bombast of most American courtroom thrillers and instead plays like something much more real. The way the court works will feel strange for most Americans; we can assume that Swiss courts work differently.
If there is a complaint here, it’s that the end can be unsatisfying, but not so unsatisfying that this isn’t worth watching.
Why to watch Anatomy of a Fall: A dark and terrible story.
Why not to watch: The ending might feel unsatisfying.
