Mascha Schilinski’s ‘Sound of Falling’ Locates Trauma in the Body’s Downward Pull

Now streaming on MUBI, Mascha Schilinski’s debut feature Sound of Falling unfolds inside a single farmhouse and across four time periods—the 1910s, 1940s, 1980s, and 2020s. Four generations of women inhabit the same rooms, but the film refuses chronology. Scenes shift between eras without warning, as if the house itself remembers, and the women’s bodies are the archive.

Schilinski has described the work as an exploration of “transgenerational trauma written into our bodies over time.” The writing, here, is largely vertical. Falls recur with a grim insistence: a boy pushed from a ledge, a mother’s legs suddenly giving way, another woman toppling dead months later. Trips, drownings, descents down stairs—each downward movement tightens a pattern. The sun, when it appears, is distant and veiled, as though the heavens have withdrawn from the land entirely.

This is not cosmic indifference alone. Schilinski places the farmstead in a world where the Judeo-Christian separation of above from below still haunts the architecture of feeling. A Baroque gallery pairing—Murillo’s Immaculate Conception beside a still-life of dead animals hanging head-down—comes to mind. One figure rises; the other submits to gravity. In Sound of Falling, without a god to suspend the fall, the body’s only direction is toward the ground. It’s a stark, somatic logic: trauma not remembered but repeated, not spoken but performed by the body’s weight.