‘Anatomy of a Fall’ movie review: analysing the theory of thrillers
Sandra Hüller has been having quite a year, delivering fascinating performances in films like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and the acclaimed new black comedy Sisi & I. The most curious of these latest additions is Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, the courtroom thriller that picked up the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes. While it’s probably the most acclaimed of Hüller’s 2023 output, does it really deserve the praise?
Just the title alone will immediately remind everyone of Otto Preminger’s masterful 1959 work Anatomy of a Murder, starring James Stewart in one of the most iconic roles of his endlessly illustrious career. However, Anatomy of a Fall is not a tribute to the seminal courtroom drama at all. Instead, it would be more appropriate to classify it as a meta-analysis of the genre and various traditions associated with its considerably vast history.
From the opening scene itself, it is clear what kind of movie Anatomy of a Fall is going to be. Sandra Voyter, a novelist (who is flawlessly played by Hüller), is being interviewed by a student as her husband Samuel blasts 50 Cent’s ‘P.I.M.P.’ in order to put a stop to the proceedings from outside the frame. As the repetitive musical loops burrow into our skulls, the strangely hostile nature of the domesticity of Voyter’s household reveals itself in interesting ways. We wait patiently for the arrival of this invisible disruptor but are only greeted by his dead corpse staining the white snow a few moments later.
It’s all downhill from there, as the visceral nature of the chaos and the unsettling promise of violence give way to a cold and clinical case. Triet, whose 2019 erotic thriller Sibyl successfully incorporated this ambiguity into the narrative tension, isn’t interested in leaning into those fatigued frameworks this time around. As a result, Anatomy of a Fall becomes a detached intellectual exploration of a theory instead of a real human being’s death.
Attempting to retroactively dissect Sandra and Samuel’s marriage, which was apparently already decaying, everything is viewed through the totalising prism of death. Law enforcement agents mill around uncovering minor discoveries, lawyers hang on to anything they can, and fragmented interviews act as ill-fitting puzzle pieces for a portrait that doesn’t want to be complete. The emphasis is always on the grinding mechanics of the legal procedure itself.
That’s not to say that there aren’t moments that grab the viewer because there definitely are scenes that linger for a while. One particularly moving scene digs deeper into Sandra’s son Daniel and his uncertainty about what happened and starts doubting his own mother, unable to decide whether to testify against her or not. But these isolated segments aren’t enough to sustain the spirit of a thoroughly soulless thought experiment masquerading as a full-length feature.
Anatomy of a Fall‘s Palme d’Or triumph isn’t a mistake at all. Rather, it’s symptomatic of the contemporary film festival landscape and the kind of visual language that it has been trying to normalise. It’s enough for a project to tick all the boxes that should make it work; what it’s actually bringing to the table is purely inconsequential. That’s exactly why festival circuit entries have increasingly started to resemble each other instead of actually conducting innovative experiments.
Sandra Hüller is the primary reason why Anatomy of a Fall deserves any acclaim, managing to construct a complex, psychologically ambiguous and morally conflicted character in a film that is thoroughly uninterested in its own narrative. For that, she deserves all the praise.
Watch the trailer below.
