Anatomy of a Fall: The Stories We Tell

The Best Movies of 2023: Anatomy of a Fall and the Stories We Tell

Anatomy of a Fall begins in a remote mountain chalet near Grenoble, France that’s home to writer and teacher Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), his wife, author Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) and their 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). They are being visited by Zoé (Camille Rutherford), a graduate student who is conducting research for her thesis and has scheduled an interview with Sandra. The latter has recently published a book whose subject matter is said to hit close to home for the family; a car accident left Daniel blind three years ago.

“The way you describe the son’s accident, it’s troubling to read because we know it’s your life,” Zoé says. “Do you think one can only write from experience?”

“[Say] I decide to put you in the book that I’m writing,” Sandra answers. “You’re in my book. And yet, I don’t know you. What I do know about is my interest in you.”

“But still, you had to meet me first. I’m real, in front of you now,” Zoé says.

“Yes, you are,” Sandra replies.

Their exchange succinctly captures several ideas that the film establishes over the course of its runtime. First, no two perspectives are the same, rendering others’ perceptions of ourselves—no matter their level of accuracy—different from our own. Second, narratives are formed through the omission of facts because we only retain the information we find most compelling. Third, it is impossible to truly capture a person’s essence when we transfer them into our stories. Even in a scenario unlike the hypothetical presented by Sandra, wherein a serious attempt is made to translate a real-life person to the page, what we are able to capture is merely an interpretation. “The map is not the territory,” to quote Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski. In spite of all this—or perhaps because of it—storytelling comes as a natural impulse to us humans.

Most Popular

Unfortunately, the women’s conversation is cut short when Samuel begins blasting music from upstairs, forcing Zoé to leave and the two of them to reschedule their interview. Later, Daniel and his guide dog Snoop return home from a walk to find Samuel’s dead body below their third floor balcony. Accused of murder after a forensic report rules out an accident, Sandra must then clear her name in court as unflattering details about the couple’s marriage come to light and the prosecution builds its case around the inconsistencies in her story. Things are further complicated when Daniel becomes the trial’s main witness and Sandra commissions her old friend Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) as her attorney.

Through its focus on narrative, Anatomy of a Fall is almost Foucauldian in the way that it problematizes our notion of “truth.” As the mystery unravels, director Justine Triet depicts our justice systems as flawed, both implicitly through its strive for so-called “objectivity,” and explicitly through the prosecutor and several witnesses’ sexist characterization of Sandra as a domineering wife. “He described your behavior as quite castrating,” Samuel’s psychiatrist tells her on the witness stand.

When explaining their defense strategy to Sandra, Vincent lays out the facts of the case in the cold, clinical manner he believes the prosecutor will invoke: “You were the only person there and, of course, you’re his wife.”

Of course. The cliché that a death within the domestic sphere must be enacted by the victim’s spouse automatically makes Sandra the prime suspect, even before the fraught state of their marriage is revealed. When Sandra responds by telling Vincent that she did not kill her husband, he tells her “that’s not the point.” Because the judge’s mind will likely be made up before the trial begins, it will be a matter not of finding out how he died, but of proving her innocence.

But perspective also clouds Sandra’s judgment. If she really is as innocent as we are led to believe and if the fall was not accidental, then the idea that Samuel committed suicide should seem obvious to viewers from the beginning. Still, Sandra dismisses this notion immediately after Vincent raises it, claiming that Samuel wouldn’t have killed himself in such close proximity to their son. It isn’t until later that she reveals that Samuel had overdosed on aspirins a few weeks prior—with Daniel in the house. Whether it was denial or a simple oversight that kept Sandra from believing her husband was capable of taking his own life, the narrative she creates to disregard both suicide attempts exemplifies the human impulse to create stories in order to muddle through what we cannot bear.

Anatomy of a Fall references its own storytelling existence on more than one occasion, seemingly aware of its role in shaping our notions of the hegemonic political, social and ideological institutions which dominate our existence—these legislatures, judicial systems and regimes of truth which we have come to accept as foolproof, equitable and sacred, respectively. It does so both in theme and in form, the latter through the liberal use of POV shots—often through the lens of an in-universe camera, such as when on-the-scene reporters catch Vincent off-guard in front of the courthouse and bombard him with assumptions about the case disguised as questions. Meanwhile, talk show hosts do what would probably be an impulse for anyone following such a trial in real-life—compare Sandra to the murderous characters in her own mystery novels. “I found this troubling quote in an interview: ‘my job is to cover the tracks so fiction can destroy reality,’” says one talking head.

In this context, Sandra’s quote could just as well apply to the hosts themselves, forming a scalding indictment of such sensationalized programs and the role they play in shaping our perceptions of reality—either deliberately or carelessly.

“Yes, and what excites people about the Samuel Maleski case, is that it seems to come from one of her books,” another host says. “I don’t think it matters how he died. The fact is, the idea of a writer killing her husband is far more compelling than the idea of a teacher killing himself.”

Meant more as an observation of the zeitgeist surrounding the case than an admission of schadenfreude on the host’s part, this remark deliciously implicates viewers (both in-universe and outside of it), while also giving grace. It implies that humans’ tendency to craft stories is innate—we can’t help it, and no amount of self-awareness stops us from doing so.

Surely, Anatomy of a Fall’s core conflict is not only plausible but also relevant to our true crime-obsessed culture. Hüller’s naturalistic performance portrays pent-up sadness, fear and frustration with stunning precision. As such, the film’s stylistic flourishes—quick flashbacks and dramatic zooms sparingly used to indicate a character’s POV changing in real-time—come off all the more jarring and emblematic of the film’s fabrication theme.

In one scene, Daniel entertains new scenarios as the prosecutor attempts to frame his mother as guilty, with editor Laurent Sénéchal cutting to flashes of Samuel’s death as imagined by the boy. In another, an audio recording of an argument between Sandra and Samuel is played in the courtroom. Here, Sénéchal cuts from the court proceedings to a flashback of the argument taking place inside the couple’s kitchen. We witness the fight escalating as the couple exchanges barbs about sex, infidelity and control. Before it gets violent however, Sénéchal cuts back to the present, observing the jury’s shocked faces amid the suffocating sounds of screams over breaking glass. Immediately after, a comical zoom takes us from a long shot of the judge’s bench to a close-up of her face, rendered speechless at the events which occurred in the recording.

In showing the pointlessness of striving for “objectivity,” both in court and on the written page, Anatomy of a Fall exposes our flawed perception of truth, then questions it. Who gets to create the narratives we hold true, and who is typically left out of this process? Early on, a police investigation is conducted by able-bodied men who seem skeptical of Daniel’s recollection of the events leading up to his father’s death, refusing to see him as anything more than a visually impaired child whose testimonies cannot be trusted. In attempting to recreate an argument that took place over blaring music the day that Samuel died, they ask Sandra to shout in French, her non-native language—which was not spoken during said argument. When Sandra and Daniel tell them that the exchange was not heated, they insist that the couple had to have been yelling in order to hear each other over the music. The account shaped from the police’s assessment is not based on reality according to the defendant or the key witness, but nevertheless creates a narrative Sandra must disprove in court. As a professional storyteller, Sandra knows the nuances that come with recollecting facts and constructing realities, and understands how this erases pure notions of truth and falsehood. She faces this time and again.

“You come here with your opinion, and you tell me who Samuel was and what we were going through, but what you say is just a little part of the whole situation,” she tells the psychiatrist. “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?”

Daniel takes after his mother. When he finally sways the judge in Sandra’s favor, it’s not because he found tangible “evidence” that his father intended to jump from the balcony, but because her testimony about Samuel’s aspirin overdose (previously unbeknownst to Daniel) unlocks a memory for him. He remembers that, around the time of this incident, Snoop had gotten sick (likely a result of lapping up Samuel’s vomit). On their way to the vet, Samuel spoke to Daniel about the need to prepare for when we lose the ones we love. At the time, he believed his father had been talking about Snoop but now, with a new perspective, everything seems clearer. The story finally makes sense. “It feels like when we lack proof,” the boy says, “we have to look further.”

Ursula Muñoz S. is a critic, journalist and MFA candidate at Boston University who has previously written for news and entertainment outlets in Canada and the United States. Her work has appeared at Xtra, Cineaste, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more. For further reading, feel free to follow her on Substack and X, where she muses about Taylor Swift and Pedro Almodóvar (among other things).

The Best Movies of 2023: Anatomy of a Fall and the Stories We Tell