Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Speaking as someone who watches too much true-crime TV, I was curious to see how this celebrated fictional movie from last year about a crime and trial might go. It won the big prize at Cannes and got a handful of Oscar nominations too, with a win for Best Original Screenplay. I’m happy to note first that, as far as I can tell, it is not a story based on real-life incidents, which somehow usually turn out terrible and strangely unbelievable in the movies. This French picture, much of it in English, is basically a domestic drama tucked away inside a courtroom drama, involving one of those cases where the evidence is too ambiguous to make an undisputed call. A man falls to his death—in the classic formulation of Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did [he] jump or was [he] pushed?” The widow, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller), is accused of murder and taken to some kind of jury trial in a very interesting and confusing French legal system. Police procedure is part of the story too, as cops and prosecutors attempt to divine what happened from odd blood spatter patterns and witness testimony, the latter of which is mostly only their 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). The marriage has been going rotten for some time. Voyter is not particularly sympathetic, arguably cold and ambitious to the detriment of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). Both are writers but only she is successful, which adds to their growing tensions. Anatomy of a Fall thus becomes a kind of rorschach test, which in many ways puts their son Daniel uncomfortably in the middle. He was partially blinded in an accident when he was 4. Samuel blamed himself for it and Sandra is inclined to agree. One of the pleasures of this picture could well be pie and coffee discussions afterward about the crime and the verdict and what happened. Anatomy of a Fall is on the long side, running to two and a half hours, but I found it entirely riveting, especially in the trial scenes that take up so much of it. Huller’s performance is pitch-perfect, reserved, self-contained, with unsettling portents and few definitive clues about the truth of the situation. Also, speaking again as someone who watches too much true-crime, Anatomy of a Fall is not a bit cheesy, which is too often a major temptation in that realm. This movie deserves all the accolades it got.