Father, mother and son: a family is suddenly engulfed in shock and inexplicable tragedy
Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
In theaters
We’re all connoisseurs of the tricks murder mysteries play on us. Their plots turn on deceptions, grievances, jealousies. We puzzle over them, not sure what matters and what’s a bluff, until the shocking reveal at the end.
The astonishing Anatomy of a Fall seems to rely on such familiar devices and desires. But writer-director Justine Triet deliberately keeps the plot (co-written with Arthur Harari) at titillating, transfixing arm’s length.
We don’t know at the outset that we’re going to end up as participants in the search for truth, not just observers.
But not all whodunit conventions go by the wayside. We get a fatal event minutes after the opening.
It’s a sunny day in the snow-packed French Alps. Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a celebrated novelist living remotely in a three-story chalet with her writer-husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner).
Sandra’s writing career is notably successful and she’s sitting for an interview with an inquisitive journalist (Camille Rutherford), but they can barely hear themselves talk over the loud music coming from the floor above.
They postpone the interview, and the journalist drives off. Samuel, whom we don’t see, is blasting the music from large speakers – to get on his wife’s nerves?
Minutes later, Sandra hears Daniel outside the house howling in distress. Partially sighted from a childhood accident, the boy has just returned from a walk with Snoop, his faithful dog.
She rushes to find them both beside the body of Samuel, his head bleeding profusely, his body lying in a pool of blood.
He’s dead. It appears he’s tumbled from a window on the third floor, striking his skull on a tool shed before landing on the ground. But how and why did he fall?
The autopsy suggests it’s unlikely that the bleeding from the dead man’s skull was caused by the fall. It’s consistent with a blow administered by a sharp instrument.
Yet the results aren’t conclusive. Traces of blood on the tool shed could mean that his head struck the edge as he fell.
But the fall itself is the most nagging piece of evidence. Did Samuel, out of despair, jump and take his own life?
Or was he pushed? Sandra was the only one in the house at the time of the fall. After rigorous procedural policing, she goes from grieving widow to prime suspect.
Sandra Hüller is the wife in a tempestuous marriage accused of murdering her husband
A year later the investigation culminates in a frenzied courtroom drama that (1) exposes Sandra’s marital infidelity; (2) pits her against a prosecutor who claims she had both motive and opportunity; and (3) lambastes her character when a psychiatrist argues that her novels themselves unmask her as a potential murderer.
This is among the most mind-bending mysteries I’ve seen. I'm still trying to recall a crime scenario that kept me this disoriented, yet spellbound, throughout.
The plot drops clues but shrouds them with hints, suspicions, guesses. With Sandra on trial, it spirals downward in dizzying corkscrew turns. What’s at the very end of a corkscrew? A sharp finale, or a vanishing point?
In her monthslong preparation for her court appearance, Sandra has been closely questioned by her suave, melancholy defense attorney Swann Arlaud (Vincent Renzi). He’s unsure of Sandra’s innocence, but no matter. He’ll defend her by relying on her integrity as a professional woman and a caring mother.
He’s up against a relentless prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz). This lion of the law, a master of serpentine argument, is determined to pull from Sandra her cynically disguised motives for murder.
Could Sandra’s bisexuality (which she’s never concealed), have fed her disdain for her husband? Hadn’t she gotten fed up with Samuel’s whining about his lackluster writing career next to her widely lauded one? Most damning of all, wasn’t her writing more sacrosanct to her than her husband and son?
Sandra seems to release something in Hüller’s acting right on screen. It feels as if it’s fueled by a grand, indisputably 21st century fervor. She boldly thrusts feminism, rage and sorrow at her accusers and at us in the audience. Take it or leave it.
Indeed, her son Daniel is key, and Sandra’s defense turns on his recollections. A tape recording is discovered of a blistering argument between Sandra and Samuel the day before his death.
In flashback we see the bitter marital quarrel in a superbly acted duel filled with acrimony, blame and festering raw wounds.
But crucially, we don’t see the physical violence at its climax. Daniel didn’t witness the altercation, only faintly half-overheard some of it, and in court he has only the tape recording to jog his memory.
And it’s only there in open court where we, too, get to hear the quarrel turn violent, when it sounds as though Sandra and Samuel came to blows.
But did they? And was their rupture so intense it could have driven Sandra, the next day, with the blaring music pushing her over the edge, to murder her husband?
The free-for-all courtroom arguments, apparently normal in France’s legal system, make for a fascinating collision of wills.
Not only do attorneys interrupt and mock one another, witnesses can challenge both attorneys and each other. The coolly impartial judge can shut down disputes in an instant, steer the discussion however she sees fit, and abruptly suspend any line of argument.
Sandra on the stand defending herself while admitting that her marriage was troubled
Wrenchingly, it comes down to Daniel’s testimony to determine whether his mother might have killed his father. And in Machado-Graner’s artfully subdued performance, the boy at the moral center of the drama wins our deepest sympathy.
We sense that the unkindest cut may have been directed not by his parents toward one another, but to the son on whom they projected their pain. This is surely one of the most remarkable supporting performances of the year.
Renzi moodily underplays Swann, Sandra’s sympathetic yet skeptical lawyer. And in the flashback to the crucial argument, Theis is powerful and movingly furious. Samuel insists that Sandra has only halfheartedly supported his career and grown cruelly aloof from him and their son.
But the killer acting here comes from Hüller, hotly and icily showing us a proud, accomplished, unapologetic writer who won’t allow life, including an admittedly faithful husband and a needy, deserving child, cut her ambitions down to size.
She refuses to be the woman who wanted too much, couldn’t cope with a blasted marriage and bumped off her husband to end it. That claim reduces her simply to the egotistical successful writer as a failed wife and mother. Unfit, spiteful, vicious.
Sandra is having none of it. And both on the stand and in her heated clash with Samuel, Hüller does some of the subtlest acting I’ve ever seen. Justified pride, genuine pity and aching sadness spill across her face. She doesn’t forsake or tone down a single honest emotion.
Guilty or innocent, here’s a woman who believes her life matters, and refuses to let herself be controlled or held back by “fate” or circumstance or even the rigors of the law.
Triet wrote the part for Hüller, and the actress grabs it and shoves her performance right in our faces. She’s startlingly, blisteringly blunt.
A cornered Sandra seems to release something feral in Hüller’s acting. Her lines, delivered in full attack mode, seem fueled by a grand, indisputably 21st century fervor. Hanging tough, Sandra flings feminism, rage and sorrow at her accusers. Take it or leave it. That seems to go for us in the audience, too.
For me it’s the best, the most emotionally challenging performance of the year, calling on a visceral, fearless art. I couldn’t look away from this woman.
See this movie not just for the kaleidoscopic, beautifully shot mystery that propels the story, but for this blazing, ferociously intelligent piece of acting.
I found I didn’t need the plot’s questions completely resolved. Hüller’s fine work rises above all of that. It’s what will most assuredly stay with me. The mystery of how she does it lies deeper than any plot twist.