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Anatomy of a Fall

Where to watch.

Watch Anatomy of a Fall with a subscription on Disney+, Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

A smart, solidly crafted procedural that's anchored in family drama, Anatomy of a Fall finds star Sandra Hüller and director/co-writer Justine Triet operating at peak power.

Fantastic acting and a fascinating plot keep Anatomy of a Fall gripping, even if it might run a little too long.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Justine Triet

Sandra Hüller

Sandra Voyter

Swann Arlaud

Vincent Renzi

Milo Machado Graner

Antoine Reinartz

L'avocat général

Samuel Theis

Samuel Maleski

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‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Review: Tumbling From the Alps to the Courtroom

Did a writer kill her husband? In this cerebral murder trial drama by the director Justine Triet, the audience never has its footing and questions go unanswered.

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‘Anatomy of a Fall’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director justine triet narrates a sequence dissecting an argument between two of the movie’s central characters, played by sandra hüller and samuel theis..

“Hello, I’m Justine Triet, and I’m the co-writer and the director of ‘Anatomy of a Fall.’” “You took the book’s best idea. How am I supposed to just go back to it? Do you realize how cynical that is of you?” “You can publish your own version. Say it inspired me. I’ll admit to it.” “So this scene comes very late in the film. And it’s the sound of a recorded argument playing in the court near the end of the trial, trying to elucidate the death of the man whom we finally come to see on screen. His wife is the accused, and this is the only time we see or hear them interact.” “I live with you, and you impose everything. You impose your rhythm, your use of time. You even impose your language. Even when it comes to language, I am the one meeting you on your turf. We speak English at home.” “I’m not on my turf. I don’t speak my mother tongue.” “So the character called Sandra and Samuel are played by actors of the same name — Sandra Hüller and Samuel Theis.” “— to create a middle ground so nobody has to meet the other on their turf. This is what English is for. It’s a meeting point. You can’t blame me for that.” “But we live in France.” “There was a lot at stake. We had to live up to the teasing of the scene. We needed to deliver a certain amount of information and to get to know the character of the dead husband. The jury and the audience listened to the recording. The clerk displays the French transcript of the argument on the computer screen, and Sandra is confronted with her own voice, with the intimacy of her marriage. And at this point, we drop into the scene. We see it. For a long time, we wondered if the scene shouldn’t remain sound only. But because sound has the power to give the perfect illusion of the present of reality, we decided to dive into it. And if you close your eyes, you can really believe that the people are there. You could almost say it’s the inner vision of the visually impaired child at the moment when he hears his parents’ voice. For me, it’s not a flashback. It’s an illustration of a sound, so it’s present. I wanted the viewer to have the very strong sensation of being projected into this intimacy. So we are in the kitchen of these people, and they are talking about very concrete things, their daily life, the way they organize their life and split responsibilities. They are professional in balance their frustrations. And the idea of the scene is simple — to show the whys of conflict and then violence between two people, a battle of arguments and ideas within a couple. So we filmed with two cameras not to lose any of their energy. We had to film their words, the words that come out of their mouth. It’s all about the actors, the truth with which they say it. And then there is a language. They speak in English, which is not their language. He’s French, she’s German, and English is where they meet. And even that becomes one of the subjects of the conflict, the language question. I wanted to shoot this scene in daylight, with strong light and the sun shining. Often, very dramatic intimate scenes are used to be filmed at night, as if intimacy were separate from the rest of life. And here I choose the opposite. And the contrast between light and violence is even stronger for me.” “I have nothing to do with it. You’re not sacrificing yourself, as you say! You choose to sit on the sidelines because you’re afraid, because your pride makes your head explode before you can even come up with the little germ of an idea! And now you wake up, and you’re 40, and you need someone to blame. And you’re the one to blame!” “They are never filmed in the same frame, except briefly in the beginning.” “This is the truth. You’re smart. I know you know I’m right. And Daniel has nothing to do with it! Stop it!” “You’re a monster.” “And just as this violence breaks out and becomes physical, the image is taken away from the viewer, and we return to the courtroom. We find ourselves in the position of the jury, and especially of the child Daniel, in a state of total uncertainty, not knowing who is hitting whom. We suddenly realize that we didn’t see anything because we were not there. We’ll never know.” [SOUNDS OF STRUGGLE] [GLASS BREAKING] [MAN AND WOMAN FIGHTING] [BLOWS LANDING] [THUD]

By Amy Nicholson

“Anatomy of a Fall,” a cerebral trial drama by the director Justine Triet, opens with a mysterious death in the French Alps. The deceased is an aspiring writer named Samuel (Samuel Theis). The suspect is his more successful wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a novelist who is a lot like her surroundings: stoic, remote and a tad frosty.

Did Sandra kill her husband? As the film flows from investigation to tribunal to verdict, it’s only interested in the question — not the answer. Triet and her fellow screenwriter (and real-life partner) Arthur Harari invite a jury to dissect the flaws of a rather average woman. Sandra drinks, but she’s not a drunk. She’s aloof, but not cruel. She needs sex, but she’s hardly the aggressor the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) describes.

Her most confounding trait is, if you believe her testimony, an ability to nap while Samuel spends his last living hour replaying a cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” at a volume so earsplitting the steel drums could have triggered an avalanche. The closest anyone comes to a motive is when Sandra’s inquisitors suggest that she was annoyed by the song’s misogynist lyrics. Her lawyer (Saadia Bentaïeb) counters: “It was an instrumental version.”

All people are unknowable, the film insists, even to themselves. If any of us were forced to defend our incongruities and fibs — the fights we avoid, the compromises that make us quietly seethe — we’d all be convicted of irreconcilable contradictions. (Still a lesser crime than murder.) Sandra just has to confess her inner frictions to a courtroom where her rationalizations hang in the air as goofily as circus balloons.

A woman in winter clothes stands alone in front of a window, with a mountain behind her.

The film doesn’t need to spend two and a half hours intoning that life is an anthology of competing narratives, that every marriage is made of two storytellers. But at least it finds a few ways to drum on the idea, most resonantly through Sandra and Samuel’s books, which draw their inspiration from a blend of biography and fiction (as did the lead in Triet’s last film, “Sibyl,” another author disastrously mining reality). That blur, notes a student (Camille Rutherford) who interviews Sandra for her thesis in the first scene, “makes us want to figure out which is which.” Sandra smiles at the challenge. Later, however, her freedom will hinge on how a jury parses her truth from others’ interpretations.

As experts take the stand to insist that their version of events is correct, the cinematographer, Simon Beaufils, switches from a composed style to one that zips and zooms, like an on-the-fly documentarian. Watching a witness parry questions from both the prosecution and defense, the image holds on him while the camera sprints back and forth to keep pace with the arguments lobbing from each side. The whiplash is dizzying.

The most important judge in the room is the couple’s preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Partly blind because of an accident that figures into the case, Daniel is uncomfortable becoming a character in the lawyers’ competing narratives. His poor vision is a metaphor for the struggle to see the truth. A more poetic allusion is how the boy teaches himself piano — not by reading sheet music, but by discovering through trial and error which notes sound right. As a bonus, we hear the passage of time in his improvement.

Triet’s filmmaking style is deliberate, an unusual approach for a story about ambiguity. She wants the viewer to decide Sandra’s guilt — she even has a minor character say so outright — and so she withholds both the answer and the pleasure of feeling like we can figure out. Even Hüller, the kind of earthy and sincere actor who builds her characters out from the spine, has admitted that she isn’t sure if Sandra did it.

In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration — or appreciating the humor of this year’s Cannes jury definitively awarding her film the Palme d’Or. I’ve gone back to study some scenes and believe Triet knows what happened on the mountain. But she’s also added feints and discrepancies that go unacknowledged, vexations that exist solely for the audience. These are secrets Triet shares only with us and the dead man. And I suspect she’s taking them to the grave.

Anatomy of a Fall Rated R for language and violent images. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters.

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'Anatomy of a Fall' dissects a marriage and, maybe, a murder

Justin Chang

Sandra Hüller plays a writer accused of murdering her husband in Anatomy of a Fall. NEON hide caption

Sandra Hüller plays a writer accused of murdering her husband in Anatomy of a Fall.

One reason Sandra Hüller is one of the best actors working today, is that unlike many performers, she doesn't seem to care if you like her characters or not. Whether she's playing a tightly wound corporate climber in the brilliant comedy Toni Erdmann or a Nazi commandant's wife in the upcoming drama The Zone of Interest, you never once catch her pleading for the audience's sympathy.

That fearlessness is partly what makes her so compelling to watch in Anatomy of a Fall , the absorbingly intricate psychological thriller that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. Hüller plays a successful German-born writer, also named Sandra, who finds herself on trial for her husband's murder.

The movie begins at a chalet in the French Alps, where Sandra and her French husband, Samuel, live with their 11-year-old son, Daniel. Things are tense between Sandra and Samuel, as we can sense from the way he blasts his music while she's being interviewed by a journalist. The interview gets cut short and the journalist leaves; sometime later, Samuel is found dead outside in the snow, bleeding heavily from a head wound.

'Anatomy of a Fall' wins the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival

Did he fall or jump from one of the chalet's upper stories? Or was he pushed? The director Justine Triet, who wrote the script with Arthur Harari, never reveals the answer. The story is full of intriguing forensic details; Samuel's fatal fall is diagrammed from every possible angle, and every spatter of blood is analyzed obsessively. But ultimately, Triet is less interested in explaining whodunit — or if anyone dun it — than in conducting an autopsy on Sandra and Samuel's marriage.

When Sandra is tried for Samuel's murder, the history of their troubled relationship comes to light. We learn that Samuel never forgave himself for his role in the accident years ago that left Daniel severely visually impaired. That took an obvious toll on the couple.

At one point, Samuel's therapist takes the stand and testifies that Samuel had described his wife as cold and controlling. But Sandra pushes back against this assessment, saying, "If I'd been seeing a therapist, he could stand here, too, and say very ugly things about Samuel. But would those things be true?"

'Saint Omer' is a complex courtroom drama about much more than the murder at hand

I don't know how accurate Anatomy of a Fall is in its portrayal of the French legal system. But here, as in last year's excellent courtroom drama Saint Omer , it appears to be an extremely different system from ours, more tolerant of extended discussion. At one point, in a scene that even the movie seems to find hilarious, the overly aggressive prosecutor starts mining Sandra's own books for evidence, briefly turning a criminal trial into a literary debate. Still, Sandra's career is hardly incidental to the case. Samuel was also a writer, but a much less accomplished one than Sandra, which may have made him jealous.

Could Samuel have killed himself in despair? That's the possibility put forth to the court by Sandra's attorney — well played by Swann Arlaud — who doesn't seem entirely convinced of his client's innocence. Daniel, piercingly played by Milo Machado Graner, also doesn't know what to believe, as he's torn apart by the loss of his dad and possibly the loss of his mom.

The movie's emotional centerpiece is a stunningly written and acted flashback to a furious marital argument that took place shortly before Samuel's death — one of those knock-down, drag-out fights where every source of tension and resentment gets dragged to the surface. They clash over their finances, their differing approaches to parenting, their unsatisfying sex life and Sandra's past infidelity. Sandra expresses her frustration at the many sacrifices she's quietly made, including agreeing to live in France.

Anatomy of a Fall persuasively suggests that every marriage is ultimately something of a mystery. The fact that Samuel is no longer alive to defend himself makes it even harder to determine who here is telling the truth. Even so, I couldn't help but gravitate toward Sandra's side. There's something refreshing about the cool pragmatism she shows in the face of Samuel's insecurity, the way she refuses to short-change her career or coddle her husband for his failures. I left admiring Sandra's steely resolve, while still wondering if that resolve might have led her to do the unthinkable.