X
- 2023
- R
- Neon
- 2 h 31 m
- 2023
- R
- Neon
- 2 h 31 m
Summary For the past year, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), her husband Samuel, and their eleven-year-old son Daniel have lived a secluded life in a remote town in the French Alps. When Samuel is found dead in the snow below their chalet, the police question whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Samuel's suspicious death is presumed murder, and S...
Directed By: Justine Triet
Written By: Arthur Harari, Justine Triet
- 2023
- R
- Neon
- 2 h 31 m
- 2023
- R
- Neon
- 2 h 31 m
Anatomy of a Fall
7.8
Where to Watch
Summary For the past year, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), her husband Samuel, and their eleven-year-old son Daniel have lived a secluded life in a remote town in the French Alps. When Samuel is found dead in the snow below their chalet, the police question whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Samuel's suspicious death is presumed murder, and S...
Directed By: Justine Triet
Written By: Arthur Harari, Justine Triet
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 44 Critic Reviews
86
98% Positive
43 Reviews
43 Reviews
2% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 44 Critic Reviews
86
98% Positive
43 Reviews
43 Reviews
2% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
It’s a knotty, fascinating delve into the French legal system, the nature of truth and the institution of marriage.
This whole film has a wizardry to it which you’ll be thinking about for days.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 169 User Ratings
7.8
84% Positive
142 Ratings
142 Ratings
11% Mixed
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
5% Negative
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 169 User Ratings
7.8
84% Positive
142 Ratings
142 Ratings
11% Mixed
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
5% Negative
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
What a script! Justine Triet hypnotizes with her careful and natural dialogues. Sandra Hüller and Milo Machado-Graner's (the son) performances are sublime. A masterpiece about the interpretation of truth. And then there's the little dog Messi (yes, that's his name in real life), for whom they should inaugurate the Oscar for Best Canine Performance.
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Anatomy of a Fall is as addicting as any true-crime story, and as riveting as some of the best murder mysteries thanks to a team effort in front of and behind the camera.
It’s a daring, long film that sometimes feels too chilly and self-indulgent, but it builds to a series of scenes that hit like a punch.
Surprisingly gripping for a film devoid of real action, this family drama masquerading as a murder-mystery touches on universal marital tensions; it is both enigmatic and very human.
Part thorny family story, part whodunit, part courtroom drama and part meditation on the nature of truth and fiction, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall takes two hours of conversations and makes them both provocative and propulsive.
As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.
Now this is how tense dramas should play out. You don't see many of these types of films being made as much as you used to. A drama that keeps your attention with great performances rather than over-the-top jumpscares or epic reveals. Sandra Huller's amazing performance carries us through this, one of the best films of the year, with an intensity reminiscent of Cloris Leachman's breakdown scene in The Last Picture Show, or Maggie Smith's role as the titular character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The best intense drama I've seen (besides all the newer Pedro Almodovar works) since Force Majeure. Timeless and perfect in every step.
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Long drama when empathy to the characters becomes colder to the end just because of running time. The genre is stated as a crime/drama/thriller but actually there's nothing from crime or thriller in it. Very hard to believe such case would be controversial in court with only side evidences.
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It’s always disappointing when a film aspires to greatness that it never achieves. Such is the case with the latest offering from French writer-director Justine Triet, whose allegedly suspenseful thriller is about as appetizing as a plate of tepid leftovers. This crime investigation/courtroom drama about the mysterious death of a middle-aged unsuccessful writer (Samuel Theis) who falls from the second story of his mountain chalet looks into whether his demise is due to suicide or murder, with his wife (Sandra Hüller), herself a best-selling author, being the prime suspect. Despite an intriguing premise, however, the movie is overlong, needlessly talky and inherently flat, with a cold, clinical, unengaging narrative and characters who engender no connection, compassion or empathy. In essence, this is a “whodunnit” that plays like an extended “whocares.” Fault the screenplay here, which seeks to tell a tale in the same gripping vein as such great courtroom dramas as “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) but that never achieves the level of tension, mystery and audience engagement needed to pull that off. The meticulously orchestrated script feels calculated and derivative virtually from start to finish, especially in its trial sequences, which explore an array of possible motives and explanations, including everything from infidelity to plagiarism to previous suicide attempts, that rely on often-implausible speculation and inflated conjecture to carry forward a proceeding that probably never should have ended up in court in the first place. What’s more, the double entendre that is the picture’s title is so obvious that any hopes of nuance, subtlety or profundity evaporate quickly once the failing nature of the couple’s troubled relationship surfaces. While the film admittedly features a fine performance by Hüller, it’s far from enough to rescue a picture with big aspirations that never pan out. How this release has garnered so much exaggerated awards season buzz is beyond me, especially given its intrinsically insipid, underwhelming, overstated character. There are plenty of other films of this ilk out there that are far more worth watching than this one, so grab one of those better selections instead and give this one the well-earned pass it genuinely deserves.
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Leave it to the French. Only they would decide to give their top award (the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival) to a French film that takes two and a half hours to suggest that families and relationships can be confusing and ambiguous. Sacré **** the film, Sandra (Sandra Hüller – “Toni Erdmann”) is a successful writer who often draws inspiration from real-life events. Her husband Samuel is a wannabe novelist. Samuel is a part-time home restorer, part-time teacher and full-time complainer. Early on, he topples to his death from the top window of their chalet in the French Alps. Was it suicide? Was he pushed? Eventually, the authorities charge Sandra based on the “suspicious circumstances” of his death. Act One is a real grind, although it serviceably introduces us to Sandra and her eleven-year-old son Daniel (an excellent Milo Machado Graner) who became visually impaired after being hit by a motorcycle (plenty of parental recriminations to go around on that one). Samuel, the husband, is a distant cipher. Halfway through the film, a flashback brings the relationship between Sandra and Samuel into focus while also providing much-needed momentum for the story. The final act centers on Sandra’s **** acting here is uniformly first-rate. Hüller is Oscar-worthy, as she compellingly depicts the ups and downs of the relationship with her husband while simultaneously displaying unalloyed love for her son. Machado Graner embodies the confusion and the terror of a child caught between warring parents. Swann Arlaud is excellent as Sandra’s lawyer, occasionally serving as a one-man Greek chorus interpreting key events.Director Justine Triet, who co-wrote the script with her partner Arthur Harari, has suggested in interviews that true-crime movies and TV series were a source of inspiration. However, Triet has studiously veered away from the habit of the true-crime genre to shape the narrative in order to persuade the viewer to a particular point of view. In truth, “Anatomy” is frustratingly non-committal, apparently finding it sufficient to demonstrate that as humans, we’re all a complicated mixture of positive attributes, personal failings and blind spots. In Sandra’s case there’s some arrogance and hubris thrown in for good measure. Given Triet’s observant, meticulous approach to character development, it’s curious that she’s much less attentive to generating momentum for the main story. For some reason, the creative team chooses to rely repeatedly on feints and misdirection to keep the audience engaged. Ultimately, “Anatomy of a Fall” is an excellent character study, but the story incorporates enough red herrings to start a fish farm.
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Any number of terrific psychological outcomes could’ve bloomed from this fertile seed. But Triet is after something more opaque than a satisfying mystery or an examination of a lethal marriage, or even a cautionary tale about the damage done to a child as the result of bad parenting. In fact, Triet is so determined to leave us guessing about practically every step of the story that frustration sets in almost immediately. It’s one thing to obfuscate. Albert Serra’s moody thriller, “Pacifiction,” takes confusion to astronomic levels yet still manages to be among the best of the year.Even with myriad scenes of head-scratching uncertainty, Serra’s overall vision is so assured we’re able to assimilate its themes through inference alone. We may not understand the facts, but we still get the meaning.With Triet, on the other hand, it becomes apparent, once the various revelations begin to drop, that there’s not really a story here. Or if there is one, Triet doesn’t seem particularly interested in telling it. The main problem is with the character of Sandra. Hüller doesn’t play her like an innocent person falsely accused of murder, or a guilty person hoping to get away with it. She plays Sandra like an amnesiac who doesn’t seem to know if she’s killed her husband or not. And though she claims her innocence, she’s not particularly convincing. Nor does she seem to want to be. And it’s this puzzling ambiguity that makes the whole “did she or didn’t she” plot line ultimately lose steam. Mysteries without an answer are not new. Antonioni’s “L'Avventura” rendered the question **** disappearance moot by transforming it into a discourse on existential ennui. And Triet almost pulls off a similar bait and switch, inserting a flashback scene of spousal discontent into the middle of her fuddled courtroom drama that brings the story briefly to **** the scene, Sandra’s husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), a frustrated author, expresses his discontent about being overshadowed by his wife’s literary success, and she responds with a litany of understandable grievances, mostly centered on their son Daniel and the accident that caused his near **** back and forth between husband and wife is heartbreakingly honest and emotionally lacerating. And I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps this was the film Triet ought to have made. Not some hokey whodunnit where none of the specifics even matter, but a raw, modern story about a combative marriage coming apart at the seams and the effects it has on a developing child. It’s also here that Hüller comes out of her bizarre malaise, stops hemming and hawing in an unconvincing attempt at naturalism, and finally delivers the kind of blistering performance we’ve been crying out for. The omnipresent soup of incoherent subtext is blessedly dropped and we hear Sandra speak her mind with a blinding clarity that slaps the audience **** it doesn’t last. Soon enough we’re back to the flimsy trial scenes which meander on in a structureless mope before coming to an underwhelming end, with a verdict I couldn’t have cared less about.There is, however, a curious third act development involving Sandra’s son Daniel (played beautifully by Milo Machado-Graner), that, though creepy in the extreme, didn’t appear to cause a moment of concern to anyone in the film. Without elaborating too much, I’ll just say that under the guise of playing amateur detective, Daniel engages in some deeply sketchy behavior with the family dog that made me question whether “Anatomy of a Fall” might actually be a story about the making of a serial killer. Whether this is Triet’s intention, or whether Daniel’s actions are just typical pet owner conduct in France is anybody’s guess. That’s the trouble with undisciplined ambiguity. It’s hard to tell if the finished product is there by chance or by calculation. For all I know the baffling plot holes and unsatisfactory threads left hanging by Triet could be just what she intended. Whatever the case, her attempt to tell a story by not telling a story has resulted in a lack of answers that has not magically produced an answer, only two and a half hours of waiting in **** THEATERS
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Production Company
Les Films Pelléas,
Les Films de Pierre,
France 2 Cinéma,
Auvergne Rhône-Alpes Cinéma,
Canal+,
Ciné+,
France Télévisions,
Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC),
Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,
Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine,
Département de la Charente-Maritime,
Cofinova 18,
Cinémage 17,
Indéfilms 11,
Cinécap 5,
Cinéventure 7,
Cinéventure 8
Release Date Oct 13, 2023
Duration 2 h 31 m
Rating R
Tagline Did she do it?
Awards
Academy Awards, USA
• 1 Win & 5 Nominations
Golden Globes, USA
• 2 Wins & 4 Nominations
César Awards, France
• 6 Wins & 11 Nominations
