Oscar-nominated ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ is a courtroom drama like you’ve never seen : NPR

And yet, here again, even as the narrative is resolved, the director lets us bask in our doubt through an impressive use of emphasis and silence, with one last extended pause that prompts us to question the truth. It’s a lovely, terrifying grace note, giving us the satisfaction of a legal drama while sending us out into the night unsure of what exactly we’ve seen. The curse of wanting to know everything, it turns out, is the eventual realization that we know nothing.

• Every decision made not just that day but over much of their marriage is scrutinized by people who have never met Sandra, Samuel, or Daniel.
• So if we know that Daniel’s arrival in the courtroom brings order to the form of the film, it makes sense that he’s a source of order in the story.
• Soon after, Daniel finds Samuel dead on the ground outside the house.
• Anatomy of a Fall arrived to more-or-less universal praise when it premiered in 2023.

Anatomy of a Fall, review: a sparkling intellectual thriller that lingers for days

Ultimately, the ending of Anatomy of a Fall was the perfect way to wrap up the story, ending the narrative on an ambiguous-yet-satisfying note that few dramas, modern or classic, can match. Yes, there were a few plausibility issues, such as with Daniel’s testimony, and there are still some viewers out there who would have preferred the movie clarified if Sandra was guilty or innocent (depending on their own interpretation). However, these camps are in the minority, and over-all the end of Anatomy of a Fall was incredibly well received as a complex ending to an equally complex story. While the Anatomy of a Fall ending leaves plenty of possibilities of Sandra being guilty, the real purpose behind the movie is the exploration of this marriage. Part of Sandra’s frustration is having to defend aspects of her marriage from people who could not possibly know the truth as she does. From the prosecutors to Samuel’s therapist to the spectators getting a glimpse inside her intimate world, they are deciding what her marriage was based on very little information.

In most American takes on this genre, you get a courtroom that is laid out in what we might think of as a church formation. The gallery, sitting on benches, faces the judge, who sits on their elevated platform. When a witness testifies, they sit beside the judge, facing the gallery, while they speak. The jury sits perpendicular to both judge and gallery, visually aligned with neither. The attorneys wait with the audience, watching, until it’s time to “go on.” It’s quite flat, with communication running in two directions at most.

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Better even, given her blazing, revelatory brilliance as Sandra, the German wife of Frenchman Samuel (Samuel Theis), and the mother of their 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who lost most of his sight in an accident while under his father’s care. Sandra is a fascinating, one-woman puzzle box, thanks largely to the strength of Hüller’s performance. As an actor, she has always thrown herself at this kind of impenetrable role – as the cold, worker bee daughter in 2016’s absurdist comedy Toni Erdmann, or the wife of a commandant at Auschwitz in Jonathan ANATOMY OF A FALL Glazer’s forthcoming The Zone of Interest.

His son finds him on the ground after he’s fallen from a window several stories up, but inconsistencies in the autopsy tells the authorities that this was no tragic accident. With Samuel’s wife, Sandra, the only one at home during the fateful event, she becomes the prime suspect and the center of a massive, sensationalized trial. To prove her innocence, Sandra must insist not that the fall was an accident, but that it was her husband’s intention to kill himself, fracturing her family in the process. Hüller is stunning, keeping much of Sandra’s motives and half-buried skeletons internal.

Even when Daniel is not being fully truthful, he is the one entirely trustworthy person in the story. Whatever he is doing, he is doing out of love alone, while his parents both acted at times out of love, but also out of anger and jealousy, resentment and selfishness. Again, he has clarity — in this case, clarity of motive. A couple of minutes later, as he’s being questioned about inconsistencies in his memory, he looks back and forth between the advocate general and Sandra’s defense attorney, who are standing on both sides of him and arguing about his testimony. For almost a minute and a half, Triet stays with an unbroken shot of his face. The camera just swings from side to side as he looks from one of these men to the other and back, so that he is always facing the lens.

Triet dazzles us here with legal minutiae, the strange crucible of this courtroom process for exploring the lives of others, weighing up everything that’s provable, and what’s not – love, for instance. What follows – half in English, which the couple always spoke, and half in French, which the lawyers and judge use – is an intellectual thriller of rare calibre, assembled so precisely and deepening so richly it continually takes your breath away. This script is a diamond, co-written by director Justine Triet and Arthur Harari.