German cinema celebrated the arrival of a bold new auteur in Cannes, as Mascha Schilinski unveiled her ghostly epic of women in one house visited by catastrophe and its echoes over generations.
It’s an astonishing work, twining together the lives of four generations of families with an intricacy and intimacy that feels like an act of psychic transmission.
Sound of Falling 2025
In die Sonne schauen
The cataclysms and cruelties of the last century in Germany had such a psychic impact they can feel like they still haunt the walls. It’s this mysterious sense of collapsed time and Gothic dread that imbues the world of director Mascha Schilinski’s poetic second feature, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and saw her heralded as German cinema’s most exciting new voice.
“Phantom pains” refer to the sensation of an amputee bed-ridden in an old farmhouse in the north of the country, but they could just as easily be describing the daily existence of the four generations of women who pass through the home over a span of decades, and are subject to the violence and inherited trauma that have blighted the society through its darkest, authoritarian turns and divisions.
The lives of Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka mirror one another in cumulative and surprising ways, as we follow the evolution and hidden abuses of the household through a mesmeric, smudged lens of candlelit gloom and glimmers of blue – a silent, collective scream for a nation in which death has been all too close to life. — Carmen Gray