Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 95 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Exquisitely well-crafted and laced with mordant humor, Sound of Falling is a haunting generational drama that announces Mascha Schillinski as a world-class directorial talent." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 90 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Guy Lodge of Variety called the film "exquisite" and "astonishingly poised and ambitious". He praised writer-director Mascha Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter for constructing an intricate story of womanhood through the lens of the four main characters, noting that "no finer point of craft, performance or poetic nuance [was] rushed or neglected". He also commended Schilinski's direction and Fabian Gamper's cinematography. Damon Wise of Deadline praised the film, calling it "superb" and "a masterclass in ethereal, unnerving brilliance". He concluded that, "Cinema is too small a word for what this sprawling yet intimate epic achieves in its ethereal, unnerving brilliance; forget Cannes, forget the Competition, forget the whole year, even—Sound of Falling is an all-timer." David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a grade of A− and wrote, "So tenderly in touch with the shared but unspoken traumas that are visited upon her cast of young women, Schilinski mines tremendous sorrow from the secret poetics of girlhood; she weaponizes cinema's ability to access the deepest interiors of human feeling, and swirls her characters together in a way that tortures them for their subjectivity." Regarding Gamper's camerawork, M. Sellers Johnson of Offscreen suggests that "there is a spectral sensibility as the camera careens and drifts through the space of the film. A sense of voyeurism accompanies this, as the camera often peers through cracks and keyholes. While these visuals somewhat mimic the viewpoint of the curious children that scatter about in each period section, they also transcend that vantage into something confounding, yet formidable."
Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter commended the film's unique method of storytelling and wrote, "Sound of Falling is arthouse filmmaking with a capital A that will best appeal to patient audiences. They will be rewarded by a work that reminds us how the cinema can still reinvent itself, as long as there are directors like [Mascha] Schilinski audacious enough to try." Alison Willmore of Vulture called the film 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", while Wendy Ide of Screen Daily called it a "work of thrilling ambition" that "announces Schilinski as a talent of considerable note". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film four out of five stars, noting that it was "dense with fear and sadness".
Emma Kiely of Collider, however, gave the film a score of 5 out of 10 and called it "a hollow, navel-gazing glamorization of female suicide, incest, sexual assault" as well as "a pretentious romanticization of the hardship women go through rather than an in-depth analysis of how systems and families can sit back and allow such trauma and suffering to claim women's lives." She criticized the underdevelopment of the characters and wrote that "the film is excessively grim to the point that it feels exploitative." Despite this, she commended Schilinski's direction, Gamper's cinematography, and the film's sound design.
