‘Anatomy of a Fall’ review: Prepare to be wowed by one of the best movies of the year

The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra. She counters that while she had slapped Samuel, the rest of the violence heard was her husband self-harming. After Sandra admits to an affair with a woman the year before Samuel’s death, the prosecution argues that Samuel’s loud music indicated jealousy over Sandra’s flirting with the interviewer, leading to the physical confrontation later. The prosecutor also notes Sandra’s pattern of writing personal conflicts into her stories, and how murdering her husband mirrors a minor character’s thoughts from her most recent novel. In turn, Sandra protests that one recording does not represent the nature of their relationship, nor do the words of a character in a novel reflect her own inclinations. Chewy ideas about privacy and intellectual property only add another satisfying layer to the film.Triet sugars all that bitterness with some much-needed laughs.

Furthermore, it’s no spoiler to say that it’s not at all clear that Daniel is telling all of the literal truth about what he saw and heard. So again, it might seem unlikely that he can provide any answers. Soon after, Daniel finds Samuel dead on the ground outside the house. Somehow, he has fallen from a height, and his bright red blood on the snow is itself a discombobulating image.

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” she exclaims to Vincent, urgently answering a question that he hasn’t even asked—maybe the most startling irruption in the film. Regardless of what Vincent privately believes, however, his plan, for the defense, is to claim that Samuel committed suicide. In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity, and exerting control over his life, before their protracted argument turns physically violent.

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Daniel, with his unseeing yet piercing gaze, turns out to be the conscience of this story, which doesn’t mean that he, his memories or his eventual testimony can be entirely trusted. Innocence, like truth, is an all-too-relative concept in this movie, and one of its lessons is that children carry traces of their parents, including their guilt, in fleeting yet intensely concentrated form. It would be unwise to get into the final scenes of Anatomy of a Fall — as noted, the film is admirably suspenseful — but Triet saves much of her rhetorical firepower until the end, when we get one final revelation that may or may not unlock the case.

The only person who can back up her version of events is her blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). When an audio recording revealed in court proves she was also covering up evidence of domestic turmoil, Daniel appears to have doubts about her innocence but ultimately gives testimony that leads to her acquittal. For the next two-and-a-half hours, “Anatomy of a Fall” almost procedurally details the investigation and trial around Samuel’s death.

It looks down, putting the whole courtroom in the frame at once. The camera holds here for fully 30 seconds, which is an eternity in movie time, and especially in courtroom drama time. The arrival of this very long, very wide shot is jarring, and it changes the tone. It calms the jitters of not fully understanding the space we’re looking at. Anatomy of a Fall arrived to more-or-less universal praise when it premiered in 2023.

The anatomy of a courtroom

Prepare to be wowed by one of the best movies of the year — a spellbinding murder ANATOMY OF A FALL mystery that is really a forensic anatomy of a marriage told through the gripping story of a wife on trial for killing her husband. More important, however, Samuel and Sandra’s accusations feel like facts colored by their respective resentments. Triet wrote the film with her own partner, the French filmmaker Arthur Harari; much as Sandra has done, they seem to have borrowed emotional elements from their own lives and placed them in a fictional context.