Oscars-nominated ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ review: Sandra Hüller dazzles in this courtroom drama that puts a marriage on trial

Sandra Hüller (left) and Swann Arlaud in a still from the 2024 Oscar-nominated Anatomy of a Fall, directed by French director Justine Triet.

Anatomy of a Fall begins in the French Alps with Sandra Hüller’s German novelist Sandra Voyter trying to give an interview while her husband, Samuel, blasts 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P on loop. It’s a petty gesture, pointing towards an already fraught marriage. Their visually impaired son, Daniel, goes for a walk with the dog, and returns to find Samuel in a pool of blood outside the house. Did he fall, did he jump, or was he pushed?

Triet plays out the rest of the movie as an investigation, peeling away layers with each scene and bringing a new piece of evidence to light. But Triet is not interested in an objective answer; her screenplay (co-written by partner Arthur Harari) and direction expertly boil the story down to a question of belief. When we don’t know what actually happened and evidence can only take us so far. Ultimately we need to string those pieces of evidence together into a narrative that we can choose to get behind.

The movie has secured five nominations at the 96th Academy Awards. Justine Triet is the sole woman nominated in the Best Director category and the eighth woman to receive this Academy category nomination.

Voyter’s friend and lawyer, the devilishly handsome Arnaud, is blunt when she protests that she did not kill Samuel. “That’s not the point”, he says. A court ,and by extension, the viewer, needs a narrative they can believe. And even though Sandra believes that Samuel’s death was most likely an accidental fall, that’s neither provable nor satisfying. So her legal defense becomes a quest to show that the death was a suicide. Sandra is understandably uncomfortable with this approach, which requires her to reveal intimate details of their life in open court, and paints Samuel in a bad light in front of Daniel.

Daniel provides the emotional centre of the film. He’s already lost a parent and he’s on the verge of losing another. He instinctively believes his mother is innocent, but doubts slowly start to chip away at him, as more evidence is introduced in court and he is forced to confront them in public with the rest of us. His desperation to unearth the truth leads to a particularly sad and scary scene with Snoop, the dog. And irrespective of the court’s judgment, his relationship with his mother is forever altered.

Triet’s screenplay drives home the point that all narratives are inherently constructed artifices. While the movie is set in France, the German Sandra is not fluent in the language, so all of her testimony is in English, which is then translated back into French for the purposes of the courtroom proceedings. It’s clear that some nuance is lost in the translation, though we don’t know what that is. We listen to damning audio recordings of the fighting couple (Samuel was also an aspiring writer, and gathering material for his next book), but those recordings cannot paint a full picture without the accompanying body language and context. We watch reenactments, but those reenactments are limited by the existing knowledge of what we know happened. Daniel himself is blind and trying to make sense of the things he can’t see. Simply put, there is always some kind of transmission loss when a story is told second-hand. And make no mistake, a story is always being told.

Anatomy of a Fall comes on the heels of last year’s Saint Omer, Alice Diop’s French courtroom drama that puts a mother on trial for the death of her child. Saint Omer was harrowing, and at times difficult to watch. But Anatomy of a Fall is much easier to engage with, insofar as a microscopic look at a crumbling marriage, and a child caught in the middle of a murder trial with one parent accused of murdering the other, can be easy.

Sandra Hüller is simply amazing as the central character. She plays Voyter with just the right combination of arrogance and self-doubt. It’s a remarkably layered role, where it’s always clear to the audience that Voyter is performing on the stand - she does not believe that Samuel killed himself but must sell that story in order to be acquitted. It’s a well deserved Oscar nomination for a complex performance. Special mention must also be made of Antoine Reinartz, whose prosecutor character understands that the courtroom is a theater and it’s his job to put up a compelling performance.

Anatomy of a Fall is an unqualified masterpiece. The film has been nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. Without getting into spoilers, the story reaches a satisfyingly unsatisfying conclusion when the judge delivers her verdict. The viewer is left to stew in the very real idea that everything in life is a constructed narrative and that there is no objective truth. A more appropriate title for the movie could have been Anatomy of the Truth.

Watch Anatomy of a Fall on Mubi GO.