Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
A marriage becomes evidence. Evidence becomes a story.
Directed by Justine Triet · Written by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari · Approximately 152 minutes · France
Starring: Sandra Hüller · Swann Arlaud · Milo Machado-Graner · Antoine Reinartz · Samuel Theis · Jehnny Beth
Cinematography: Simon Beaufils · Editing: Laurent Sénéchal
Definitely recommended — owner confirmed. The owner really loved this film. The new review and advisory wording remain an editorial draft.
How much of an argument would you be willing to have played in open court? Not your polished account of it, rehearsed after a shower and a decent night's sleep. The real thing: the unreasonable accusation, the grievance you've trotted out a hundred times, the sentence you aimed precisely where you knew it would land.
Anatomy of a Fall makes that prospect terrifying. A man is found dead below a chalet in the French Alps. His wife becomes a murder suspect. The investigation needs to work out what happened to a body; the trial keeps trying to work out what kind of woman was married to it.
Justine Triet builds an absorbing thriller out of that gap. The physical mystery matters. So does the pressure to compress a complicated relationship into a tidy account somebody else can believe. Sandra Hüller gives the film a centre strong enough to push back against the explanations piling up around her.
Before you watch
- Violent death and bereavement: a bloody body and injury evidence are shown. A child discovers his father's death and experiences sustained distress during the investigation and trial.
- Domestic abuse: a recorded marital confrontation includes sounds of violence. Physical and emotional abuse are discussed; the competing accounts of particular acts are not all established fact.
- Suicide and self-harm: a possible suicide, an alleged earlier overdose and accounts of self-injury are discussed.
- Animal peril: a dog becomes seriously ill onscreen. The cause and outcome are described in the protected section.
There is also strong language, sexual discussion and brief post-mortem nudity. BBFC guidance corroborates these advisories.
Runtime note: The BBFC's cinema version runs 151 minutes 48 seconds, which is where the rounded 152-minute reference comes from. Criterion and Cannes say 151; the early press kit says 150. Those catalog differences don't establish separate cuts.
An interview that cannot continue
Sandra Voyter is a German writer living with her French husband Samuel and their eleven-year-old son Daniel. Daniel has a visual impairment and a close bond with the family dog, Snoop.
The film drops us into Sandra's day during an interview that gets hijacked by music thumping from elsewhere in the house. The visitor gives up and leaves. Daniel heads out with Snoop and comes back to find his father dead in the snow. The fall itself is withheld.
That opening plants more than a missing piece of action. We are already reading Sandra's behaviour before there's a case. Is she flirting with the interviewer? Is the music an act of aggression? How much certainty have we quietly attached to a scene we've barely walked into?
The tune is an instrumental cover of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band. Its relentless cheerfulness turns oppressive through sheer volume and repetition. It can feel funny, hostile and absurdly indifferent to the room at the same time. The arrangement is instrumental; the scene does not reproduce the original song's lyrics.
Hüller refuses to become a useful symbol
Hüller's Sandra is direct, clever and perfectly capable of defending herself. None of that should be suspicious. Under sustained questioning, though, self-possession becomes usable as evidence of calculation — just as hesitation would have become evidence of concealment.
The performance keeps that trap open. Hüller lets a reply carry irritation, effort or hurt without handing us a separate signal telling us how to file it. We understand what Sandra is trying to say while staying unsure about everything the reply leaves out.
There are flashes of warmth and vulnerability, but they never work as certificates of innocence. A person can love her child, be unfair to her husband, defend her work, and still remain a person rather than a solved psychological profile.
Triet wrote the role for Hüller after Sibyl. In her Cannes interview, she describes the actor's gift for making dialogue feel inhabited. That's the crucial quality here: Sandra seems to have a life running well past the questions the film lets us ask.
The result gives the thriller more force than a performance built purely on inscrutability could. We have a person to attend to, not just an expression waiting to be decoded.
Who gets to choose the language?
Sandra is being tried in France, in a language that isn't hers. English, the tongue she and Samuel shared, offers different ground on which to explain herself. Switching between languages changes how much effort it takes to make a thought sound precise.
The film makes that effort dramatic. We can hear a person hunting for a word while other people decide what the delay means. The difficulty of expression becomes inseparable from the judgment of character.
Language was already part of the marriage's negotiations. What looks like neutral ground to one partner can feel like a concession demanded of the other. The courtroom magnifies a problem the couple already lived with: who has to translate, adapt or yield so the conversation can continue?
This is one of the screenplay's sharpest joins. A marital fight and a criminal trial both run on people giving accounts, challenging accounts, and fighting for control of the terms on which they're understood. Different aims, same tug-of-war — and it passes cleanly from the kitchen to the dock.
The courtroom makes a marriage look manageable
The forensic evidence throws up competing reconstructions. A body, a height, an injury, a possible trajectory — all of it seems to promise a technical answer. What reaches the courtroom is still an interpretation of those things.
Which isn't to say facts don't matter. The disturbing part is how desperately they matter when their meaning stays disputed. The film keeps us hooked on the physical question while showing how fast an argument can slide from evidence to a character assessment.
Reinartz's prosecutor gives that slide an unsettling fluency. A stray detail becomes an indictment of an entire way of life. Sandra's work, her sexuality, her conduct as a wife — all of it becomes raw material for a persuasive story.
Arlaud's Vincent Renzi is the quieter counterweight. He knows Sandra and wants to defend her, and that familiarity both gives him access and muddies his distance. He also needs an account that will fly in court — which may mean trimming things the person living inside the story finds intolerable.
The setting and procedure are specifically French. Triet and Harari consulted criminal lawyer Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse while writing, as the mk2 press notes discuss. Read its trial as filmmaking, not a full correspondence course in real procedure.
A child's attention changes the stakes
Machado-Graner's Daniel makes the film far more than a duel between clever adults. He has to sit through accounts of people he thought he knew — and their marriage goes public at the exact moment he's lost one parent and needs the other.
The performance is attentive without turning Daniel into an implausibly omniscient child. He listens, revises, and feels the cost of not knowing. A courtroom question can be a technical matter for a lawyer and a quiet threat to the person answering it.
His visual impairment gives sound extra weight, but the film never turns disability into a supernatural lie detector. Attention has limits. Memory has limits. The adults with supposedly better access to the world are constructing shaky accounts too.
Triet says she wanted the child's perspective to sit alongside Sandra's, in the press-kit interview. The effect is to stop the mother's experience from swallowing the film's whole emotional field. Whatever you decide about Sandra, Daniel has to keep living in the family that's left.
Snoop, played by Messi, gives that relationship a physical presence outside the verbal combat. Touch, routine, closeness — they carry something testimony can't. The dog is an animal a boy leans on, not a magic witness who certifies the answer for us.
A lived-in image, a sound you cannot ignore
Beaufils's photography gives both the chalet and the courtroom texture without turning either into a prestige display case. Faces and rooms stay open to observation. The rough edges let an exchange feel stumbled into rather than perfectly arranged for our verdict.
Triet has explained that the production shifted from a hoped-for 35mm approach to digital with older lenses. Her Cannes interview describes the dense, unpolished effect she was after. It suits a film whose image is detailed without being all-revealing.
Sénéchal's editing gives conversations room to breathe while constantly shifting whose reaction counts. A look can complicate the sentence we just heard. The length lets an interpretation become convincing, then become inadequate.
There's no conventional dramatic score telling you how to vote. That doesn't mean the film is musically bare, either: Daniel's piano playing is its own strand. Sound belongs to rooms, bodies, recordings and the act of listening.
The distinction lands hardest when a recording seems to offer something undeniable. We can hear what happened. Then the film asks how much the sound actually proves — and how much of it we supplied ourselves.
The pleasures and the pressure of a persuasive argument
The film hands you plenty to chew on without ever dropping the gut-level pleasure of a thriller. A question lands when it's asked. A contradiction reshuffles a scene. Hüller and Arlaud make the slog of building and holding a defence genuinely absorbing.
Its most glaring limitation is the prosecution's habit of turning every corner of Sandra's life into a loaded proposition. The pressure is sometimes so tidily concentrated that the courtroom starts to feel like a machine built to generate the film's themes. Reinartz's forcefulness makes it vivid — and occasionally a little blunt.
The runtime is a commitment, too. Long stretches of testimony demand attention to fine distinctions rather than constant scene changes. If that's your idea of a good time, the accumulation is the whole appeal: it gives the marriage enough competing dimensions to resist a tidy summation.
The Palme d'Or, awarded at Cannes on 27 May 2023, and the Oscar for Triet and Harari's original screenplay are useful context. The reasons to recommend it stay onscreen: the performances, the structure, and the way a supposedly precise inquiry exposes how flimsy our judgments about each other really are. Cannes awards and the Academy's 2024 record confirm those honours.
Corny DNA
There's theatricality in the courtroom, an absurdly stubborn musical cue, and a dog who became part of the film's public identity. None of it tips the film into accidental ridiculousness. Its tension depends on taking people and their interpretations seriously.
The rewards of a rewatch lie in the speech, the reactions, the shifting loyalties. Numerical Corny DNA scores remain unassigned.
Verdict
Worth watching — owner approved. Hüller and Machado-Graner give the film its emotional engine; Triet and Harari build a trial that makes listening feel consequential. The owner really loved it and explicitly recommends it.
The film sustains a gripping question about a death while prying open harder ones about marriage, work, memory, and the stories people need in order to keep going. Its intelligence is matched by the feeling those questions acquire for the people forced to answer them.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the recorded argument, Daniel's experiment, verdict and final scene
A recording provides access and takes it away
The couple's recorded fight becomes an embodied scene: Samuel and Sandra tearing into work, time, resentment and the division of their lives. When the confrontation turns physical, the image snaps back to the courtroom while the sound plays on.
That withholding matters. Sandra admits to a slap but gives a different account of the remaining noises, including self-injury by Samuel. A recording doesn't resolve every disputed action, and one recorded blow-up can't stand in for an entire marriage.
The charge that Sandra used Samuel's literary material does something parallel. Private life becomes material for a novel; the novel becomes material for a prosecution theory. Authorship grants her an apparent mastery of narrative and doubles as a reason to distrust her. The film makes the reasoning legible without ever ruling that fiction is a confession.
Daniel's experiment cannot reconstruct a death
Daniel deliberately feeds Snoop aspirin to test his theory about the dog's earlier illness and Sandra's account of Samuel's alleged overdose. Snoop gets seriously ill and pulls through. The scene stings precisely because Daniel endangers someone he loves in pursuit of an answer.
The experiment makes one part of a possible account more plausible to Daniel. It doesn't prove how Samuel died. That gap is crucial: supporting an inference about an earlier event doesn't establish the intention behind the later fall.
Marge's talk with Daniel is about the burden of deciding when certainty isn't on offer. His eventual testimony describes a car journey and words from his father that he now reads as a goodbye. The visualised account stays attached to his telling — and in the press notes, Triet distinguishes it from an objectively guaranteed flashback: it may be memory, construction, or testimony that can't be independently proved.
The film doesn't require us to certify Daniel as either a perfect witness or a deliberate liar. He's a grieving kid trying to build an account he can live with. That can carry emotional conviction without ever becoming unrestricted factual access.
An acquittal and a homecoming
Sandra is acquitted. The verdict answers the trial's immediate demand; the film still never shows us the fatal event or settles its cause. The legal conclusion leaves the underlying event unseen.
Sandra has dinner and drinks with her legal team before going home to Daniel. Their reunion carries mutual fear alongside the relief. The child comforts the parent, a reversal that makes survival feel messier than a victory lap.
The last image is Sandra resting with Snoop, who comes close to her. It offers physical companionship after a film built on testimony. The dog isn't delivering a hidden verdict — he's offering a form of contact that doesn't need another persuasive explanation.
The ending leaves them with a life to inhabit rather than a case the audience can close with total authority. That restraint has force because the people stay specific. We've spent enough time with them to want something a verdict alone can't give.
Sources
- mk2 Films: official film page and premise.
- mk2 Films: primary press notes, credits and interview with Triet.
- Criterion: director-approved edition, credits and 151-minute catalog length.
- BBFC: exact release timings and content guidance; contains spoilers.
- Festival de Cannes: Benoit Pavan interviews Triet about the relationship, performers and photography.
- Cannes: official 2023 winners announcement, dated 27 May.
- Academy: 2024 nominations and original-screenplay win.
- Alexandra Schwartz for Criterion: critical context, forensic disagreement and the recorded confrontation.
Recommendation confirmed by the owner. This is a researched editorial draft; the new criticism, advisory wording and unassigned numerical scores are separate from that approval.