‘Anatomy of a Fall’ review: Prepare to be wowed by one of the best movies of the year

Anatomy of a Fall received great reviews and enjoyed lots of awards success, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and picking up five Oscars 2024 nominations, winning for Best Original Screenplay. Sandra’s feelings of being misunderstood come to a head when the court turns to her marriage, a once-electric connection corroded by professional rivalry, sexual jealousy and stressors both quotidian and existential. The one flashback we get of the couple — a dispute in which long-held resentments rise to a furious boil — is among the most persuasive, powerfully unsettling scenes of conjugal strife I’ve seen onscreen. Theis plays Samuel with a terrifyingly raw anguish, while Hüller shows us a woman seesawing between desperation to salvage her relationship and anger at the prospect of curbing her ambition to accommodate her husband’s wounded ego.

• Director Justin Triet’s legal drama currently holds a 96% critical score and 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
• The judge lays strict ground rules to prevent anyone from influencing his testimony and brings in a court monitor, Marge.
• Lawyers, witnesses, and a “spatter analyst” or two seem to interrupt one another at will, or at random, often from a seated position.
• In due course, Sandra is tried not just for murder, but also for the lesser crimes of being a bad wife, a distant mom and, worst of all, a better artist than her husband.
• Speaking largely in English, the language in which—as a compromise, or in search of common ground—they raised Daniel, she is a mother with no use for her mother tongue.

The anatomy of a courtroom

It’s like a new language, stripped of complicated syntax and flowery adjectives, and it’s our job to learn how to read it. It’s what you do to put someone else at ease, to let them know you’re not a threat. Whether it’s a subconscious habit or a choice, so many of us do it that it’s no wonder men often—infuriatingly—expect us to supply one on command. But there’s a type of woman who doesn’t move through the world this way. Her smile is so rare, reserved only for occasions of her choosing, that you can’t always tell what she’s thinking. She can be a little off-putting, unapproachable; you’re never fully sure what to make of her.

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Triet’s script – co-written with Arthur Harari – lets a wrecking ball run through Sandra’s life. The more we crave to know as an audience, the more both prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) and defence attorney (Swann Arlaud) tear out chunks of her soul and serve them up as evidence. Did he fall or jump from one of the chalet’s upper stories? The director Justine Triet, who wrote the script with Arthur Harari, never reveals the answer.

It was incredibly risky for Justin Triet to end the story without fully clarifying if Sandra was guilty or not, but walking this narrative tightrope ultimately became the key strength of the final moments. Memory is fallible, so his multiple shifting testimonies are easy to explain, but the fact that his testimony always shifts in favor of Sandra and only in response to evidence that looks bad for her, makes it look like he’s changing his story to protect her. On the other hand, if Sandra truly did kill Samuel, she now has to live a lie for the rest of her life, including lying to Daniel. Additionally, if she was lying about Samuel’s suicide to cover up her involvement, Daniel may have also been lying to back her up, in which case she knows Daniel is aware of her deception.

Anatomy of a Fall is roughly structured like a courtroom thriller, with evidence collecting and interrogation that eventually lead to a lengthy trial; the title and some of the advertising even hark back to Otto Preminger’s 1959 classic, Anatomy of a Murder. But Triet lets us know early on that this won’t be an ordinary procedural. She stretches unlikely moments while brushing over the kinds of turns that in more conventional hands would become key passages, thus weaving the idea of uncertainty into the very fabric of her film. The nominal question hovering over the story is whether Sandra actually killed Samuel or whether a depressed Samuel threw himself out of the window.

Indeed, fans of legal shows, on TV, or of Otto Preminger’s crisply organized “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) will be taken aback by the free-form nature of the proceedings in Triet’s movie. Lawyers, witnesses, and a “spatter analyst” or two seem to interrupt one another at will, or at random, often from a seated position. The prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), a shaven-headed smirker, roams around snapping and snarling, and I, for one, would toss him out of a high window without a second’s hesitation. What the setting most resembles is a brasserie full of squabbling law students, and you half expect the clerk of the court to arrive with bowls of onion soup. If there’s anything keeping this infernally twisty story straight, it’s Graner’s haunting performance as young Daniel, a gifted pianist, amateur sleuth and devastated son whose suffering can’t be so easily reduced to a formal device or a red herring.

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Jarring courtroom scenes are lightened by Saadia Bentaieb’s unusually expressive judge, while one especially tense moment is broken by what’s basically the Comic Sans of crash zooms. No, what Triet is doing is performing an autopsy on a relationship that, once upon a time, started as Film ANATOMY OF A FALL a heated romance for a twentysomething couple before responsibilities, resentments, compromises, tragedy, and time slowly asphyxiated it to death. There’s most certainly a homicide at the center of Anatomy of a Fall, but it doesn’t necessarily stop or start with that body on the ground.