Anatomy of a Fall (2023) Review: A Marriage on Trial

Is Anatomy of a Fall worth watching?

Yes. Anatomy of a Fall is a brilliantly constructed courtroom drama that is really about how we judge other people’s marriages, and Sandra Hüller’s performance at its centre is one of the best of the decade. Justine Triet turns a death in a snowbound chalet into a gripping investigation of truth, perspective and storytelling. The main caveat is its deliberate ambiguity: anyone expecting a conventional whodunit with a tidy solution should adjust expectations, and at 151 minutes it asks for patience.

What is Anatomy of a Fall about?

Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a successful German novelist, lives with her French husband, Samuel, and their eleven-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), in a remote chalet in the mountains near Grenoble. Daniel is visually impaired after an accident years earlier. One winter day, he returns from a walk with the family dog to find his father dead in the snow below the house. It is unclear whether Samuel fell, jumped or was pushed, and suspicion soon falls on Sandra. With the help of Vincent (Swann Arlaud), a lawyer and old friend, she prepares for a trial in which Daniel becomes a key witness.

Anatomy of a Fall is directed by Triet from a screenplay she wrote with Arthur Harari. It is a French production, largely in French with significant passages in English, and runs 151 minutes. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2023, the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Golden Globe for Best Non-English Language Film and the César for Best Film.

A trial that becomes a marriage story

The film’s genius is how it uses the machinery of a courtroom drama to examine something much harder to prove: what goes on between two people behind closed doors. As the investigation proceeds, Sandra and Samuel’s private life, their careers, resentments and compromises, is dragged into public view and argued over by lawyers, experts and strangers. Every piece of evidence becomes a story someone is telling, and the film keeps asking whose version we are inclined to believe, and why.

Language is part of that. Sandra is a German speaking French with difficulty in a French court, and falling back on English when she needs to be precise. The film makes her discomfort a quiet but constant pressure, a reminder that credibility often depends on who can tell their story most fluently.

Sandra Hüller’s unreadable brilliance

Hüller, who earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, gives a performance built on refusing to reassure. Sandra is intelligent, guarded and sometimes cold, and Hüller never tips the audience off about what she is feeling or what she might have done. We are put in the same position as the jury, reading her face for clues and finding our own biases reflected back.

Machado-Graner is remarkable as Daniel, a child forced to weigh his parents’ lives with an adult’s seriousness, and his scenes give the film its emotional heart. Arlaud is warm and quietly complicated as Vincent, and Antoine Reinartz makes the prosecutor an aggressive, almost theatrical presence. Even the family’s border collie, Snoop, gives a performance that critics singled out.

Where the length and the courtroom rules show

Triet’s approach is deliberately exhaustive, and the running time sometimes feels it. Some sequences of testimony play out at a length that tests the momentum, and viewers used to Anglo-American courtroom dramas may find French trial procedure, with its freewheeling questioning and speculation, loose to the point of implausibility. The film’s refusal of certainty is a principled choice, but it will leave some viewers feeling they have been denied a payoff.

Who should watch Anatomy of a Fall?

It is essential for fans of intelligent thrillers and adult drama, and for anyone who enjoys arguing about a film long after it ends. It is best watched in one sitting with full attention, because details matter. There is strong language, bitter marital conflict, frank discussion of sex and suicide, and some upsetting scenes involving a child and a dog, though very little on-screen violence.

For companions from the same shelf:

• Amour, an earlier Palme d’Or winner that also looks at a marriage with unsparing honesty.
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire, another major recent French film about how women are seen and judged.

The verdict

Anatomy of a Fall is a gripping legal drama that becomes something richer: a study of how truth is constructed from fragments, prejudices and competing stories. It is long and deliberately unresolved, but Hüller’s performance and Triet’s sharp, intelligent writing make it one of the essential films of the 2020s.

Rating: 4.5/5