‘Anatomy Of A Fall’ Review: Sandra Hüller Shines In Justine Triet’s Ferociously Intelligent Murder-Mystery – Cannes Film Festival
21.05.2023 - 16:53
/ deadline.com
French director Justine Triet returns to Competition with a cerebral smash that might finally bring the Best Actress award that its star, Sandra Hüller, was cruelly denied in 2016 when Maren Ade’s festival hit Toni Erdmann lost out in every category. That film wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and the formidably forensic Anatomy of a Fall might not be either, but Hüller’s screen magnetism cannot be denied. Between this and her role as “Queen of Auschwitz” in Jonathan Glazer’s equally brilliant Zone of Interest, Hüller has Cannes in the palm of her hand. Whether she will also get a Palme in her hand is up to the jury.
The French like a good courtroom drama and they do them well, as Alice Diop’s Saint Omer proved last year. Triet’s film is very much in that mold, a ferociously intelligent and deceptively playful drama that uses genre as a Trojan horse through which to tell the story of a normal family’s sudden implosion.
The setting is a chalet in the snowy French Alps, where Sandra, a well-known German writer, lives with her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis). Sandra is being interviewed by a young PhD student, who has lots of questions about Sandra’s fiction, but the meeting is disrupted when Samuel, upstairs and unseen, starts blasting out a cover version of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P and puts it on repeat. The noise is too much for the student, and the pair agree to reconvene later. As she leaves, the girl passes the couple’s young, partially sighted son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is out for a walk with his dog Snoop.
All of these details, seemingly trivial at the time, come back later in the plot, for reasons about to become clear: returning from his walk, Daniel finds the lifeless body of his father, who has fallen