French director, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” poster and title imply a thriller about a murder, but through a surprising turn of events, it turns out to discuss a loveless marriage.
At face value, the film is about a husband either falling or being thrown out of the third-story window. The only other person in the house is his wife, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller). The suspicion immediately falls on her.
The film moves to a courthouse where Sandra is on trial, and the dialogue continues to switch between French and English.
Besides what is actually discussed in the trial, the site of the courthouse is engaging in its setting: French lawyers in their signature robes, panel discussions, novel readings, yelling and unreasonable sexual accusations.
Triet even reveals that she told Hüller to play Sandra like she didn’t kill her husband, and the death is too ambiguous to decide if it was a suicide or a murder, so the audience never actually finds out the truth, with the film primarily focusing on the downfall of the marriage.
The husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis) before his death starts placing his phone around the house to record his conversations with his wife to gather material for his book. These recorded conversations reveal the nature of their relationship in the trial. Samuel claims that Sandra has stolen his life and time, and Sandra responds: “You choose to sit on the sidelines because you’re afraid!… You wake up at 40 needing someone to blame. You’re the one to blame! You’re petrified by your own standards and your fear of failure!”This is the most emotional scene of the movie. Hüller delivers this monologue in a way that it doesn’t seem that the words are from a script, but that they came directly from her.
I would not only consider her acting the peak of the movie, but the peak of this year’s cinéma.
Lastly, the film is ridden with complexities and the twists of a human nature. The audience can’t get behind one of the characters, because it is vivid that each of them is always keeping a thought or a secret that would fill in the missing puzzle piece. As the movie concludes, when we don’t understand all of it, we make up the element that would solve the mystery.