A small pleasure among the many indignities of freelancing in NYC is using my movie pass to see a free matinee movie in the middle of the week. Most recently I saw Sound of Falling, the loosely intertwined and century-spanning story of a German farmhouse and the generations of girls who grew up there.

The movie also functions as a haunting, with the viewer not able to initially discern exactly how the disjointed timeline relates to itself or whether there are supernatural elements or simply historical reverberations. A running theme is the casual violence of the male gaze which leads to an atmosphere of dread not just permeating the dank 1900’s cellars but also sunny open fields.

In the 149 minute runtime director Mascha Schilinski develops vivid sensual languages. Eschewing a soundtrack or score, Falling still uses sound quite effectively by pulling it away to develop tension then homing in on a single element like a pig eating or fly buzzing. Through the lighting we see how drastically society has changed in this century. The farmhouse is introduced as a candlelit semi-feudal agricultural dwelling for a family and servants at the onset of World War One, then followed all the way to the present where a Berlin family seems to have picked it out as a country fixer-upper project.

I left the theater thinking this movie was long, bleak, and really well done and tried to get my frayed nerves to feel normal again. But waking up this morning I could not stop thinking about it. I think my dreaming brain had been mulling it over all night, finding more connections, thinking about how the sense of touch was portrayed, noticing the brilliant rhythm of the sequencing of scenes.

The foregrounding of the German farmhouse and my reaction to this movie itself reminded me of the book The Poetics of Space where French philosopher Gaston Bachelard uses the analogy of rooms of a house for how we store memory and impression in the subconscious. He makes an argument that certain art, like poetry, can bypass the language-based brain, enter the house of the subconscious, affect the reader, and then re-emerge back out into the consciousness in a translated yet diminished state.

Although it was a difficult watch I’m ultimately glad to have allowed my inner house to be haunted by Sound of Falling.