Critics reviews

In an era delivering fistfuls of insipid, predictable, algorithmic movies, here’s a work of traumatic beauty that stands out like a colossal, throbbing sore thumb... There are momentary images [in Sound of Falling] as fatalistically sublime as any from old masters like Tarkovsky or Haneke – or, perhaps, the visceral equivalents of a Rembrandt or Rothko painting.

[Sound of Falling] is a huge film of righteous anger and despair that seeps into you and, through dramatic repetition and storytelling rhythm, transmits its feminist cri de coeur. Schilinski is in such control of every frame, cut, prop and camera move that it’s often breathtaking just to witness the emergence of this grand tapestry of grief.

[Schilinski's film] is aware of corrupting legacies, but it is also open to the notion of spiritual release. Sound of Falling asks a fair bit of audiences. It provides great rewards for those who oblige.

[Sound of Falling] is difficult to watch, but for all the right reasons. Crafted with exquisite care, by a director and crew in full control of their material, it is a brilliant, horrifying, breathtaking piece of filmmaking, that left me weeping for the future of our daughters and hopeful for the future of cinema.

The ‘stone tape theory’ posits that traumatic energy imprints into the walls of houses; [the] family home [at the centre of Sound of Falling] is pregnant with it... The film ultimately achieves an intricate uncovering of hidden and unspoken truths, revealing their influence across time.

Stunningly accomplished... Schilinski shows a remarkable mastery of the medium, announcing her as an important voice in world cinema... It’s a cliché to say that a film will stay with you long after you leave the cinema. This one could haunt you to the grave.

Sound of Falling is visually seductive, sometimes overwhelmingly so... The writing is pitch-perfect, eschewing explanation and granting the audience the rarest of cinematic pleasures: the permission to be immersed without a lecture, the quiet intelligence that invites empathy without virtue signaling.

Sound of Falling is an emotionally dense... film that rewards the patient with phenomenal imagery and beautifully subtle storytelling. In terms of second-ever feature films, it feels like a warning shot fired by Schilinski, whose vision is self-assured enough that its minor shortcomings... almost feel like intentional choices made to mimic the fallibility of memory.

“Sound of Falling” operates like a ghost story, complete with a haunted house, but the ghosts aren’t supernatural. The ghost is history.

Every detail in Sound Of Falling is in service of creating its dreamy yet unnerving atmosphere, and Schilinski’s aesthetic judgement is exquisite throughout... The profound sorrow of Schilinski’s film comes on slowly, but it clings to the viewer after the movie has ended like the smell of smoke on a winter coat.

The attraction is in the haunting texture of the picture, its delicate, breathy wonder... [Sound of Falling] is, in a sense, a necrology—a catalog of death—that takes a bleak and unsentimental stance on human suffering. Its effects are woozily disorienting.

Often lovely and occasionally disturbing... Schilinski establishes a mesmerizing world of feminine mischief and libido, transgression and abuse... Here is a movie whose atavistic excursion through time transfixes, even as its psychology remains as fuzzy as a photograph smeared by motion.