Film Review: Anatomy of a Fall is a brilliant dissection of the human condition

Anatomy of a Fall stars Sandra Hüller as a writer trying to prove her innocence in her husband's death

• Anatomy of a Fall 
• ★★★★★
• Cinema release 

The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, Anatomy of a Fall (12A) initially seems to be offering a straightforward premise when Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) dies in an improbable fall from the balcony of his Alpine chateau.

The only plausible suspect, assuming the fall wasn’t accidental, is Samuel’s wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller), an author whose novels tend to blend reality and fiction, and while there is one possible witness to the tragedy, it’s Samuel and Sandra’s young son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is partially blind.

But as Sandra’s lawyer friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud) teases out the minutiae of what appears to be an open-and-shut case of domestic homicide, the investigation becomes an exploration into who Sandra truly is, during the course of which her entire life winds up on trial.

Anatomy of a Fall stars Sandra Hüller as a writer trying to prove her innocence in her husband's death

Written by Arthur Harari and Justine Triet, with Triet directing, Anatomy of a Fall is a slow-burn psychological thriller that is partly a police investigation and partly a courtroom drama. 

But proving Sandra’s innocence or guilt is not the ultimate goal: instead, the film seeks to remind us that people are never one thing or another, but complicated, multi-faceted creatures whose most dramatic experiences are very rarely definitive. 

‘A couple is a kind of chaos,’ Sandra observes when she’s questioned about an argument she had with her husband the day before his death; where the prosecutor imagines a straight line between the verbal violence and Samuel’s death the next day, Sandra, a novelist, refuses to unnecessarily link random events.

Clever and profound, gripping and emotionally complex, Anatomy of a Fall is a brilliant dissection of the human condition.