Anatomy of a Fall Review: A Truth Personally Acknowledged

The following review contains light spoilers for Anatomy of a Fall. If you want to experience the film completely uncontaminated, we recommend watching it before you read.

“Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner,” a husband tells his wife during a critical fight in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Soon he is dead, she’s the prime suspect, and the audience is left with conflicting narratives and no easy truths, a state of cognitive dissonance from which the movie offers us no relief, as it subtly explores the depths and contradictions underlying our perception of fiction and reality.

The film follows Sandra Voyter, a woman accused of murdering her husband, Samuel Maleski. But Anatomy of a Fall is not a murder mystery. Instead, the film explores isolation in the institution of marriage, guiding us through the secrets we keep in order to protect ourselves. Nobody truly knows if Sandra killed her husband, and, in some ways, that’s not the point. What is most important is the anatomy of this film and the (often ghastly) facets of human relationships that the director’s meticulous scalpel carefully reveals.

Taking place in the French Alps, this understated sticky drama seeks to understand the complexity of language, and what its inherent ambiguity conceals (and reveals) about the state of a troubled marriage. Sandra is a German native who has relocated to the French Alps with her husband, Samuel. We come to understand that this was not her decision—at least from the way she tells it. 

Given the location, it is surely no surprise that for the majority of this film, everything is very white. This fact provides a beautiful contrast to the muted tones of the interiors of Sandra’s home and the courtroom where she’s eventually tried. The only pops of colour we see are as part of the legal uniform in the courtroom. In my view, this aesthetic choice underscores Sandra’s tendency to see the world as strictly black or white with no in-between. 

Justine Triet uses fine details to speak what is never said. Subtle costuming choices provide additional insights into Sandra’s psychology, such as in the action of Sandra removing her blazer when she is questioned on her ‘plundering’. At the times she feels most confident in her beliefs, her neck is exposed, but when she is fearful, she wraps up in woolly clothing. All of this combined makes Anatomy of a Fall not just another box office hit—it’s an on-screen play. Everything about this film is shrouded in mystery, from Sandra Voyter herself to the French legal system. 

Voyter seems to lack any semblance of empathy for anyone who isn’t her. Daniel has just lost his father, yet she seems almost frustrated by his gut-wrenching sobbing and refusal to move from his bed. Voyter also eats and cooks because she doesn’t want to feel anything.She is uncomfortable expressing her emotions. This is apparent when she starts to cry in front of the open fridge but quickly stops herself by saying, “I’m so tired of crying,” when we haven’t seen her cry at all prior to this point. Some may argue that this refers to what we don’t see, but I believe this to be an act. Crying after your husband has died is what well-adjusted humans do, and if she wants to walk free, she has to fall into that role.  

Sandra also uses her success and seemingly adept ability to write amidst chaos as crass social capital to bolster her authority within her marriage and seems to view arguments with her husband more as an opportunity for  interpersonal point-scoring than as a means to seek common ground and reconciliation with her husband. Never taking responsibility for anything—and disputing reciprocity in a marriage—she fills Samuel with insecurity and guilt. When Samuel says he wants things to change so he can write, Sandra becomes perturbed and flips the argument on its head, placing sole blame on Samuel. 

Triet’s decision to frame the central argument that may have been the emotional impetus for Samuel’s death, whether that death was a murder or a suicide, as evidence within the trial, presenting the key final moments of the fight only as audio and forcing the audience to draw their own conclusions about what actually happened, is vital to preserving the inscrutable ambiguity of Sandra’s character and her motives. Her iciness is reminiscent of Charlie in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Their command of language is similar in that they believe their partners to be self-pitying and pathetic while never examining their own behaviours. Another similarity is that Sandra and Charlie both cheat on their respective significant others, with Sandra’s infidelity serving as a central focus of the prosecution during her trial. 

The choice of music in Anatomy of a Fall really brings a starch to an already hefty meal. An intriguing detail is that Sandra is the only one to never play music. Samuel repeatedly played an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P at the time of his death, and her son now repeatedly plays Albéniz’Asturias (Leyenda). Is music an escape from Voyter’s cold-hearted nature? For most people, loud music like Samuel’s would bother them if they were trying to have a conversation, but it doesn’t rattle Sandra. She never reacts—it is merely an inconvenience to her, much like her marriage. 

There is never a perfect partner in a marriage, but for it to work, there needs to be a balance. However, Sandra cannot reconcile herself to this, thereby ensuring her continued unhappiness. Many audience members have been fooled into believing she is yet another woman being punished by a selfish man, but this is far from the reality here. A flawed woman is a scourge on their ideological landscape.  The most heinous affliction of a progressive society is a potentially guilty woman. They go against the foundations modern civilisation is built upon: this belief that womankind have broken out of their patriarchal prisons. Anatomy of a Fall forces us to ask ourselves if this is an absolute truth or just another social fiction.