Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) is this year’s Palme d’Or winner, and it recently came to theaters in the states. For the first twenty minutes, I kept flashing back to earlier this year, when I wrote a glowing review of Tár, a movie that Brandon was much less fond of; it seemed like, at last, I had finally come face to face with my own prestige boredom piece, as I found the opening scenes didn’t initially catch my attention, but once the plot gets going, I was very invested. 

Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is a German writer living in a snowy region of southern France with her husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) and their son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). The film opens with Sandra giving an interview to a young woman studying her work (Camille Rutherford) before the interview is first interrupted and then abruptly concluded by Samuel’s loud music from upstairs. Daniel, blinded at a young age as the result of a street accident that damaged his optical nerve, takes a walk with his faithful guide dog Snoop, only to discover the dead body of his father at the base of the house, near a wood shed and below both a second-floor balcony and a third-floor window into a room where his father had been recently working. The police are called, and when an autopsy reveals that his head wound was sustained prior to hitting the ground, suspicion falls on Sandra. She seeks help from an old friend and lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), and when they review the details together, he tells her that, if she is indicted, it will be almost impossible to convince a jury that the death was an accident, and that their best chance at acquittal would be to argue that Samuel had committed suicide. When further evidence compounds to further insinuate Sandra’s guilt, an indictment is inevitable, and we watch this play out as both a courtroom drama and a portrait of a family being torn apart by doubt. 

One of the oddest things about this movie is that, despite being a prestige picture, in the darkness before the film begins, projected against the screen was a URL: didshedoit.com. It’s one hell of a marketing technique, and even feels a little tacky when taken in combination with the cinematic quality and legacy within which the film is situated. After my screening, I checked out the site because I was curious as to whether it was real or not or was perhaps meant to be attached to another reel for a different movie or series of trailers but no, it’s a poll in which you can vote on whether you think Sandra killed Samuel. As of both the evening on which I saw the film and at the time of writing, the poll sits at almost perfectly ⅓ guilty, ⅔ not guilty, which was reflected in the feelings of my viewing trio. I’ll tip my hand now and say that I was among the two who do not believe that Sandra is guilty (or, at the very least, I cannot be convinced of it beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt), but I also will adamantly state that her guilt or innocence is irrelevant, which is why this polling situation seems so bizarre. 

Information about Sandra and Samuel’s relationship is doled out slowly and with masterful intentionality. At first, we have no reason to believe that Sandra would be inclined to kill her husband, and as the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) paints a version of the events of the day leading up to Daniel’s discovery of his father’s body, he adds layers of intent. Could the bisexual Sandra have been upset about Daniel intentionally ruining her interview with a pretty young woman? Hasn’t she cheated on him in the past? Hadn’t they had an argument that turned physical just the previous day, which it turns out that Samuel surreptitiously recorded? But any one of these things could just as easily contribute to the narrative that Samuel took his own life—Samuel was the one who was ultimately responsible for leaving young Daniel with a babysitter, which lead to the accident that cost him his sight, and Samuel himself has never been able to get over it and has been rendered impotent by his guilt. Even though Sandra believes (or at least claims to believe) that Samuel would not have committed suicide and only accepts (or seems to accept) this potential explanation for events due to having no way to prove her stated innocence, she does admit that he attempted an overdose with aspirin earlier in the year. Daniel’s attempts to help his mother by establishing that he heard his parents speaking calmly with each other before he went on his walk cannot be corroborated when they test this possibility, which leads to his own doubts. However, the revelation of his father’s earlier attempts cause him to reframe his own understanding of the situation in a way that leads him to ask to be called to the witness stand a second time to talk about a conversation he had with his father that seems only now to make sense. 

Where the genius of the film lies is in that perpetual reframing, for the characters within it and within our own judgments as members of the audience, to whom pieces of evidence are presented over time. Where you stand on Sandra’s guilt or innocence can change very suddenly, as we learn more about her and her potential motives as well as Samuel and his own character and desires. A non-extensive, quick search of the internet tells me that the French legal system has adopted the same precept of presumed innocence as the U.S. (nominally) has, so one would assume the same or similar legal protections for Sandra as one would have in the states, but this is a trial that features an extremely antagonistic and far reaching prosecution and expert witnesses who seem more invested in securing a conviction than in honest testimony, not to mention that Sandra’s sexuality is frequently treated as if it means that she is inherently more suspicious than the “average” citizen. The prosecution offers up computer modeling of how Sandra “definitely” struck Samuel on the second floor balcony in order to leave behind three stray splashes of blood—the primary keystone for their accusations—while a physical model provided by a witness for the defense is presented only with the argument that their interpretation of the on-site evidence is equally consistent with their suicide theory. In what I hope is an exaggeration about the leniency of French court system with regards to what they will allow prosecution to put forth, the judge even allows a section of one of Sandra’s novels to be read in court, a sequence in which a first person character wishes for the death of their husband, and this is allowed to be entered into the record as evidence. 

Like most Americans, I grew up being propagandized by things like Law & Order into thinking that prosecutors are bastions of truth and justice, and unlearning that has admittedly been a long road; however, in no other piece of media have I ever felt so strongly about how ACAB includes prosecutors. Reinartz is doing stellar work here at creating a character that you have no choice but to despise, a sniveling, rat-faced little Grima Wormtongue of a man who, even when you are in one of the phases of the movie in which you’re convinced of Sandra’s innocence, you wish you could just pinch out of existence like a pimple. Also doing some extremely heavy lifting is Machado-Graner, who with this film alone deserves to be canonized as one of those exceedingly rare child actors whose presence improves a film rather than diminishing it. His sense of loss, first of his father and then over and over again with his mother in increasing amounts, is palpable, and that the film’s climax hangs upon his shoulders is a big gamble, but it not only works, it soars. As he gives his speech, in which he recounts a conversation with Samuel that they had months before—while returning from the vet when Daniel’s dog got sick, which unbeknownst to the boy was the result of the dog licking up his father’s suicide attempt-induced vomit—that he now believes (or is pretending to believe, or even simply willing to believe) was his father communicating with him honestly but subtly about his ideation and the need to be ready for when “he” goes, leaving it ambiguous as to whether “he” is Snoop or Samuel. 

I believed that the film would end there, and a part of me wanted it to. I know that the majority of general audiences now are very hung up on plot and resolution, and there would have been outcry if the film left two ambiguities to the viewer’s imagination; that is, whether Sandra was guilty or not and whether she would be convicted or acquitted. I won’t spoil the latter and I’ve already made my decision about the former, but I don’t want to make my case for it since I would rather allow those reading this who have not already seen it the opportunity to know only what I thought while being unburdened with why. I would have felt the film complete even without knowledge of the ruling, however, and there’s a part of me that wishes that version of the film existed, as it would leave even more topics open for discussion with others after the film was over, but I am also content with what we have. For instance, it’s fascinating that Daniel’s final testimony plays out on screen with him and his father as a flashback, as several previous scenes had, but we never hear his father’s voice, only him as he recounts Samuel’s words. What are we to make of that? In an earlier scene, when the court hears the recording of the argument between Samuel and Sandra on the day before his death, the playback begins and then we are transported into that moment to watch the argument play out, up to the point where violence is about to begin, at which point we are back in the courtroom hearing the recording. From there, we only have Sandra’s word as to what the sounds we hear are (although there is physical evidence to back up her claim that one of the sounds was Samuel punching the wall hard enough to leave a hole). When discussing the physical evidence and the, ahem, anatomy of the fall, the prosecutor’s witness’s version of events includes a flash-brief shot of Sandra striking Samuel just as he describes; no symmetrical shot appears during the defense’s expert witness’s testimony. This distinction between what we as audience members are presented with as “video” “evidence” and that which we only hear described is an integral part of the questions that the movie will leave you with, as the film has a distinctively documentarian feel (which it draws attention to near the end of the second act, as the camera “follows” the presiding judge offscreen and then returns to focus on the center of the dais, as if the camera operator had been taken aback by unexpected movement and attempted to keep it in frame). 

I’m usually hot or cold on prestige dramas like this, and Anatomy of a Fall is one that definitively falls into the former category. We don’t get many courtroom dramas on the big screen anymore, as the small screen world of copaganda has eaten up most of the general public’s allotment of attention for that genre, but this is one that’s well worth the time and the praise that it’s been receiving. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond