8. An award-winning movie: Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

List Progress: 4/12

Recounting a past event is always going to be complicated. Life isn’t like a movie, where flashbacks can show an objective retelling of what happened. Even if people aren’t actively lying, to others or themselves, emotion colors recollection and no one who wasn’t there will ever know the absolute truth of a situation. This conundrum is at the heart of the 2023 French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall; on a normal winter day in small town France, a husband and a wife had a disagreement, their son went for a walk, and the husband fell from a window to his death. Did he jump? Was he pushed? Is the wife lying about her involvement? Is the son lying about what he witnessed? None of these questions have clear answers, and both the characters and the audience are left to twist in the uncertainty.

Sandra Voyter is a successful German novelist, who met her French husband Samuel in England before they moved back to his hometown. Samuel is a frustrated writer in his own right, and tormented with guilt over an accident years ago that seriously damaged their son Daniel’s eyesight. The home is a pressure-cooker of anger and resentment; even language becomes a battleground, as Sandra speaks English at home, while Samuel and Daniel respond in French, though pointedly no one speaks German. After Samuel’s death, Sandra has to navigate a lengthy and contentious trial mostly in French, occasionally in English, and never in her mother tongue. Everyone is speaking past each other and no one is really communicating.

The trial becomes a giant tangle, with experts confidently presenting the same evidence and asserting it reaches opposite conclusions, and the media dissecting the situations like their twists in one of Sandra’s novels. The slow discomfort is very effective, though it does lose some steam in the conclusion of the film, which feels like it goes on for a few scenes too long. But Anatomy of a Fall draws you into this one family’s personal-hell-made-public in a very engaging way, and while it can be uncomfortable, it always feels intentional.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.