Anatomy of a Fall

“Sometimes, a couple is kind of a chaos and everybody is lost.” Acclaimed novelist Sandra Voyter (Hüller) is trying to explain the complexity of the relationship with her husband, Samuel (Theis). She is doing this in a courtroom in Grenoble, and she is doing this because Sandra has been accused of murdering Samuel, of pushing him off the balcony of their three-story mountain chalet. The testimonies given thus far haven’t been going her way. Well, maybe they have, it’s difficult to pinpoint these things from one moment to another. Welcome to Anatomy of a Fall, filmmaker Justine Triet’s brilliant Rorschach test of a courtroom drama, winner of the 2023 Cannes Palme d'Or, and this year’s French export (after 2022’s Saint Omer) of women on trial for murder and the legal system that judges them.

With surgical precision, Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari’s script exposes nearly every contemporary relationship schism you can imagine (or maybe would sooner forget). Professional and personal rivalries, infidelities, shame, and resentments are all drawn out as topics of motive as the case progresses in trying to determine if this was murder or suicide. The third key player in this drama is Daniel (Graner), the couple’s 11-year-old son, visually impaired as a result of being struck by a motorcycle at age 4 – an accident that altered the dynamics of the entire family. Daniel was leaving to walk his guide dog Snoop (Messi) when the events began that led to Samuel’s death, and he is a key witness. The court assigns him a guardian, Marge (Beth) to keep his testimony from being influenced by his mother. But Daniel is having memory problems of his own, due to the trauma of his father’s death. Or is he? As he sits with Marge in the courtroom listening to the testimonies, Triet uses Daniel to illustrate the various scenarios conjectured. He may hold the key to his mother’s future, or perhaps he just thinks he does.

The centerpiece of Anatomy of a Fall is a conversation between Sandra and Samuel on the day before his death, a conversation that Samuel had secretly recorded on his phone for an ongoing literary project. It is given into evidence as audio, but Triet depicts it as a flashback – the only true one – in a film that plays with truth and belief the way a cat might play with a dead mouse. It is also the only scene in the film to feature the couple together. In the exchange, which devolves into shouting and violence, not a single psychic wound is left unprodded, and the sheer emotional density of the scene is gasp-inducing. And while it’s a prime example of that chaos that Sandra describes to the court, Anatomy of a Fall’s recurring theme ultimately belies this sequence we witness; that one can be reduced to, say, a castrating bitch or a self-pitying failure. To merely believe the one negates all the other aspects that inhabit us. Triet’s film is a marvelous reminder of this flawed perception. For we are large, and contain multitudes.