Trauma. Memory. Grief. One begins to suspect there exists somewhere a pan-European grant application where applicants simply circle three approved nouns and receive €800,000 and a Cannes slot. This is not entirely the fault of the filmmakers. The economics of contemporary arthouse cinema practically require this kind of internationally legible seriousness. While watching the trailer for Mascha Schilinski’s second feature Sound of Falling, I could practically see the pitch deck for the project: jam packed with screenshots from The White Ribbon, Lore, and The Zone of Interest. Give us austerity. Rural decay. Children  wandering through hallways. Adults standing in doorways. Long silences. Candlelight. Animals behaving ominously. Weird psycho-sexual stuff. If you are a young director trying to secure financing through co-productions, grants, and festival infrastructure, your pitch needs to communicate itself almost instantly across borders and institutions.

Which is precisely what makes Sound of Falling so fascinating. Because on paper, the film appears assembled almost entirely from these familiar components, and yet somewhere inside its first hour, Sound of Falling begins slipping free of its own pitch language. The movie is dense with thematic material (inherited violence, girlhood, bodily vulnerability, the residue of history) but it rarely announces itself as being “about” those things. Through its unusual structure, Sound of Falling starts to reveal itself as a film haunted by the recurring visual language of arthouse cinema itself. 

The film follows four girls: Alma in the 1910s, Erika in the 1940s, Angelika in the 1980s, and Lenka in the present day. Time periods shift without warning or explanatory transition. Schilinski rejects the idea that one timeline should function as the “present” while the others exist merely as flashbacks. All periods in the film are equally here and now, then and there, generations layered atop one another like quadruple-exposed film stock. Her inspiration came partly from exploring an abandoned farmhouse that had sat untouched for decades, still filled with furniture and traces of its previous inhabitants. Walking through it, she began imagining all the lives that had occupied the same spaces before her, all the ordinary and catastrophic moments layered invisibly atop one another. 

At the risk of sounding completely insane, the film’s understanding of time kept reminding me not of Andrei Tarkovsky or David Lynch or any of the expected arthouse reference points, but of a song from the animated fantasy television series Adventure Time. Specifically, Rebecca Sugar’s “Time Adventure”–written for the  series finale–whose central idea is basically that time is less a line than a kind of simultaneous emotional landscape:

If there was some amazing force outside of time 

To take us back to where we were 

And hang each moment up like pictures on the wall 

Inside a billion tiny frames so that we could see it all, all, all 

It will look like,will happen, happening, happened Will happen, happening, happened 

And we will happen again and again 

Schilinski’s film operates on almost exactly the same intuition. That certain experiences continue existing all at once, suspended somewhere outside ordinary chronology. Ironically, despite the song coming from the series finale, Adventure Time itself never even really ended. The universe (and brand) continued through additional spin-off series and movies. Hollywood has already reached the terminal stage of this process, where entire billion-dollar franchises now feel generated from spreadsheet-recognizable nostalgia patterns, audiences trapped in an endless loop of sequels, reboots, legacy characters, multiverses, and intellectual properties feeding recursively upon their own past successes. Arthouse cinema, despite its self-conception as an oppositional or purer alternative to Hollywood, has quietly developed its own version of the same phenomenon. Different aesthetics, same industrial logic: recognizable signals reduce risk. These films will happen, are happening, happened already.  

What makes Sound of Falling fascinating in this context is that it accidentally starts functioning  as a kind of meta-commentary on arthouse cinema itself. The film is literally composed of four variations on the same prestige-cinema architecture: four girls, four historical periods, four iterations of rural European unease layered atop one another inside the same house. By stacking these repeating aesthetic and thematic patterns directly on top of one another, the film begins exposing the genre’s own underlying structure. It reveals how contemporary arthouse cinema has developed its own recurring institutional visual language. The result feels like watching an entire  genre dream about itself.