Review: ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Enthralls Audiences with a Chilling Depiction of Murder

Score: 90/100

If you are looking for a mix between a murder mystery and a cerebral courtroom drama, then you are in luck. Anatomy of a Fall, the most recent Cannes Film Festival winner, has exactly what you are looking for. Set on a picturesque background of the French Alps, Justine Triet’s most recent film is an introspection on the nature of truth, pain, and the identities we create for ourselves. 

Anatomy of a Fall opens with novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) being interviewed by a student about her work. The interview comes to an abrupt halt when Sandra’s husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis) blasts an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” on repeat from the attic. Sandra’s partially blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), has taken the family’s seeing-eye dog, Snoop, out for a jaunt in the Grenoble foothills. Sometime after the student has been forced to end her interview and Daniel has made his way back to the chalet, that’s when we see it: Samuel’s body bleeding in the snow. 

The rest of the movie follows an investigation by police into Samuel’s death, which they believe to have been the result of foul play. After becoming the prime suspect in her husband’s murder, Sandra reaches out to her lawyer friend, Vincent, played by the tousle-haired Swann Arlaud, to defend her in court. Triet builds Anatomy of a Fall out of a singular question: Did she do it?

While that question looms on the utmost facade of Triet’s movie, what the French filmmaker and co-writer, Arthur Harari, want to examine goes beyond initial preconceptions of what a murder mysteries usually are. Triet’s film serves as a dissection of a relationship, one that began as a hot-blooded and passionate romance between two young creatives that has soured to resentments and tragedy. Or was that truly what Sandra and Samuel’s was? That’s for the audience to decide, at least. 

We are asked to discern whether Samuel’s death was a murder by a frustrated and cold woman, fed up with her husband’s blame for his struggling writing career, or a suicide by an unstable man who felt hopeless, trapped in a relationship with a woman whom he thinks blames him for their son’s accident in his youth. We explore how both people dealt with the pain of almost losing their child, while Samuel became depressive and retreating inwards, it is revealed that Sandra began stepping out in their relationship. In fact, Sandra’s grieving process involves her exploring her sexuality with another woman, a fact that the prosecution uses to muddy the waters of the trial and tries to use as evidence of Sandra’s disdain for her husband. 

Anatomy of a Fall is unique in its use of language. Although it is a French production (there was some controversy over France’s Oscar committee selecting a different film for submission to the 96th Academy Awards), a good two-thirds of the movie is actually in English. Sandra, herself a German immigrant, is not fully fluent in French, further complicating the trial. The language barrier in the film adds to the sense of suspicion that looms over the film’s second act.

Hüller and Arlaud’s performances are captivating, enveloping their characters in layers of intrigue, concealing their intentions. Machado-Graner, in spite of his age, holds his own against these seasoned actors of European cinema and Saadia Bentaieb is joy to watch as co-counsel. 

Although Anatomy of a Fall does suffer from some unorthodox editing choices that doesn’t really add to narrative and comes off as jarring to the film’s overall tone. The intricacies of the plot and stellar performances by far outweigh the negatives of the movie.

While Triet does ask the audience to determine Sandra’s culpability in her husband’s death, the conceit of the film centers on the nature of truth itself. It is true that Sandra’s relationship was strained, but does that mean she killed her husband? It is true that Samuel struggled with depression, but does that mean he chose to end his life? The story is purposefully ambiguous and obscure to make the audience question how we construct what is true.

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