Anatomy of a Fall, the hit legal drama by rising star Justine Triet, has garnered numerous accolades since it first premiered at Cannes – but in addition to all of the talk about how great the film is, there is one obvious question that rises to the top: so… did she really do it? But, in reality, that isn’t the truly important question, or what the film is really seeking to analyze.
“I did not kill him.” “That’s not the point.”
More than looking to uncover a culprit of one crime, the film instead attempts to take a much deeper look at the impossibility of truth itself, and the difficulties that arise when trying to find one single truth to explain a moment in time or an entire relationship. So let’s dive in and unpack all of these questions, plus take a closer look at the film’s key message about how the most important truth might just be the one we choose for ourselves.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TRUTH
Anatomy of a Fall opens in the middle of an attempted interview that isn’t going so well. Graduate student Marge is attempting to interview author Sandra Voyter about her work – or, more specifically, the way her work relates to her real life. Sandra gracefully avoids giving anything away, seemingly more out of a desire to have a real conversation instead of being grilled about herself, but the larger issue is the instrumental version of 50 Cent’s PIMP absolutely blaring from upstairs. Sandra’s husband Samuel is at work in the loft, and has decided to put the song on full blast on repeat. The interview, going nowhere, is postponed and Marge leaves. Sandra’s visually impaired son Daniel takes their dog Snoop for a walk, and upon his return finds the scene that sets the film’s plot in motion: his father in a pool of blood out in the snow. What follows is a court case ostensibly about figuring out what really caused his death – did he jump, or was he pushed? – but it ends up being more about dissecting not just Sandra and Samuel’s entire relationship, but the essence of ‘truth’ itself.
The film is interested in the subjectivity of ‘truth’ – how we can think we know exactly what happened, only to find out more information and realize we don’t actually have the full picture. We are constantly presented with ideas that seem, on their face, to be true, only to then have equally convincing, yet totally contradictory information given to us. The ‘truth’ is built around the experience of a situation, and facts are always colored by the perception of everyone encountering the information. This is true for Samuel’s death – initially, we might assume he fell accidentally. But upon their initial investigation, the police begin to suspect that it wasn’t accidental and was actually a murder carried out by Sandra in a fit of rage – and some of the information they provide about the way the body fell and the uncovered facts about the animosity in Sandra and Samuel’s relationship are pretty compelling. But then we learn that Samuel was in a very depressed state of mind – he felt guilty for his son’s accident, and also unhappy with his life as a teacher instead of a writer – and so the idea that he deliberately jumped of his own accord also seems like it could be true. It’s these last two options that the film mainly oscillates between – who chose to end Samuel’s life? Him or Sandra? But as the story unfurls, we are continually confronted with the reality of how real life doesn’t fit into a neat, easy to digest narrative structure like the books and films we consume.
“I’m sorry. But… I don’t know, you, you come here, okay, with your, maybe your opinion, and you tell me who Samuel was, and what we were going through… But what you say is just a… it is just… a little part of the whole situation, you know?”
The ‘Fall’ in the title doesn’t just refer to Samuel’s fall from the window, but also the pair’s relationship’s fall from functionality, and – most key to the story – Sandra’s fall from the image of parental goodness in her son Daniel’s eyes. Daniel, only 11, still sees his parents as innately good people in the uncomplicated way children do. But as his mother’s trial wears on and he learns more about the reality of their relationship, and the struggles faced by both parents, he begins to understand that human beings – even his own parents – are much more complex than he realized.
“My love. I just want you to know that I’m not that monster, you know. Everything you hear in the trial it’s just.. it’s twisted. It wasn’t like that.”
What he thought were the ‘truths’ of his life and family are shattered, which opens the door for doubt.
Even Sandra’s own understandings of the truths of her life are brought into question, twisted around and made to be nearly unrecognizable. Much of the prosecution’s case is based on the most negative aspects they could dig up about the couple’s relationship – how they fought, how she cheated, how unhappy Samuel seemed to be. But, as she repeatedly points out, these are only parts of the truth – when you pull out only the worst aspects of a situation and put them in the spotlight, of course it makes everything seem dire, but that doesn’t mean that’s actually the experience they were having of the entire relationship.
“I think it’s possible that Samuel needed to see things the way you describe them, but… if- 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?”
Across all of the relationships and interactions on screen, the biggest roadblocks are the failures of communication…
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Anatomy of a Fall explores the difficulties of fully communicating your perspective or experience, across multiple planes: from the way we can have a difficult time really understanding someone else’s perspective because our understanding is so clouded by our own to the more literal issue of disconnects between languages. Language is a key undercurrent of the film – Sandra’s native language is German, Samuel’s is French, and they both spoke English when living together in London. Upon moving to Samuel’s hometown in France, he (of course) found it much easier to fit in and communicate because he was able to speak his native tongue. Sandra found it considerably more difficult to communicate because while she can speak some French, it’s not at a very advanced level, which can make it very hard to fully explain your thoughts and feelings. At home, the family speaks English, and this becomes a huge sticking point in the relationship. Samuel feels that she is controlling him (and the family as a whole) by ‘making’ them speak what he refers to as ‘her’ language instead of French.
“You impose your rhythm, your use of time, you even impose your language.”
But as she points out, English isn’t her language, either – it’s the middle ground between the two. But in this battle we can see how each person’s different perspective of the situation has colored their understanding of the truth – Samuel wants to believe that every problem he is experiencing is not of his own doing but something being done to him. He hasn’t failed to write because he procrastinates on it, but because she won’t let him; he does the the brunt of the child care not because he chose that path, but because she’s too busy; he doesn’t speak English at home because it’s the fair middle point that allows everyone to communicate comfortably, but because she is forcing the family to conform to her preferred language.
You might notice that many of these complaints are a flip of the way we usually see this fight play out on screen, where the wife has been made to stay home and take care of the children and give up her own career so that her husband’s may flourish. This comes across in the way they have their fight as well – the only time Samuel is on screen, speaking for himself. But we’re also shown how, actually, the facts of the situation aren’t as simple as Samuel would like to believe. He says she controls everything in their life, but really most of the things he’s complaining about seem to be the direct result of his choices that she then went along with.
“You’re incapable of facing your ambitions and you resent me for it, but I’m not the one who put you where you are!”
He decided to give up his life to homeschool their son after their accident even though he’s capable of going to school. He is the one that decided to uproot the family from London (where Sandra had a support system) to go live in his secluded hometown where only he has a community. He doesn’t finish his books, and resents her for being able to do so. And this seems to be the crux of the fissure in their relationship – he resents that she refused to give up being an independent, individual human being after getting married and having a child.
That’s not to say that Sandra is totally free of culpability here – in addition to the cheating (or, as she eventually explains, one instance of cheating and other instances of relationships that ‘don’t count’ as cheating because she told him about them ahead of time) it’s also revealed that Sandra was inspired a key idea from one of Samuel’s book outlines and turned it into her own successful novel. She says that at the time he told her to use it, since he was scrapping the book, but in their argument he makes it clear that he still holds resentment over it. But is he really mad that she took the idea, or that she took the idea and made it into the book that he chose not to.
“You wake up at 40 needing someone to blame. You’re the one to blame! You’re petrified by your own fucking standards and your fear of failure! This is the truth!”
We also see this discrepancy in how they see life come into play when Sandra describes their lives after Daniel’s accident: Samuel wanted to hide Daniel away from the scary world in an effort to protect him from being hurt again, but Sandra felt that he needed to be free to go out and live life like a normal kid.
“I thought he should be happy and live his life, because it’s the only one he’s got.”
Their fight is intense, and ends with a physical battle that we hear but don’t see – Samuel had been making audio recordings of parts of his life for an upcoming book – and so again are left to decide which version of the event is true. The prosecutor makes the case that the entire fight is definitive proof that Sandra is a hot head that’s quick to turn violent; Sandra, of course disagrees. The prosecutor continually attempts to put forth the idea that because they were unhappy in parts of their relationship, that means that the whole thing was a horrible failure, but Sandra tries to get the court to understand that these angry moments were only part of the larger truth of their relationship.
“Sometimes a couple is kind of a chaos and everybody is lost. Sometimes we fight together and sometimes we fight alone, and sometimes we fight against each other, that happens. But that is just a small part.”
We recently saw another example of how heated and straight up mean couples can get when they feel like they’re trapped in an unhappy situation in Marriage Story.
“I can’t believe I have to know you forever!” Marriage Story
They have raging screaming matches and even say some pretty horrendous things but, like with Anatomy of a Fall, the film isn’t necessarily interested in picking sides, but instead exploring these characters’ two separate realities and how their perspectives affect their choices.
Sandra’s difficulties in effective communication don’t end with Samuel, though. We see how the darkness of the unknown and shreds of doubt cloud her interactions with even those closest to her, as well as the literal problems she has trying to defend herself in court where she is expected to speak in French. Having to try to explain the intricacies of a relationship can be difficult normally, but having to do so in your third language while on trial for murder adds an immense amount of stress. And the almost reality-tv-esque, free-flowing nature of the courtroom, where both the prosecution and defense are doing their best to spin the most convincing version of events ups the drama even more. A major theme of the film is the fear of judgment for one’s choices in a relationship, or in life more generally, and here we see that made literal as Sandra is put on trial. When speaking with her lawyer about their own past relationship – in which he confesses to loving her and she says that she can’t even remember the person she was then anymore – we see this fear of judgment break through.
“When you look at me like that, I can feel you judging me.”
YOU JUST HAVE TO DECIDE
Though the film is more interested in exploring various themes, of course it’s impossible not to wonder if Sandra really did kill Samuel. The film deliberately avoids clarity on this issue, and actress Sandra Huller even said that when she asked director Justine Triet about it, she told her to “play her like she’s innocent,” which is, of course, a very different answer than, “yes, she’s innocent.” But in the end, finding out who was responsible for Samuel’s death isn’t the point of the film. The film instead takes a very different path to giving us an answer and posits instead that what really matters is the truth that you choose to believe in.
Daniel’s life is of course shaken up by his father’s death, but a new and even more complex wave of trauma arrives as the trial goes on and he comes to realize that the world, and his parents, aren’t all so simple (or unquestionably good) as he once thought. He has to really contend with the fact that it could be possible that his mother did this terrible thing, and becomes justifiably upset and confused trying to figure out how he’s supposed to know what to really believe. An epiphany comes during a conversation he has with his court-appointed carer – when he asks her how he’s supposed to know what is true, she tells him that at a certain point, when you’re present with two options that seem equally possible and there’s no other information that you can gain to help you choose the “right” one, you just have to decide which reality you’re going to believe is true. This is where Daniel is able to, for the first time, take some agency within the flurry that he’s been thrown into. He asks to speak to the judge one more time before the end of the trial, and relays a memory of a drive with his father. Outside of the one fight scene, every idea about Samuel and his thoughts or choices put forward has been someone else’s perception of it, but here we’re shown Daniel literally putting words into his father’s mouth.
“He could get tired, you know.”
We, like the judge and jury, have no way of knowing if this is an actual memory, or something that Daniel has created, but the reason behind his sharing it is clear – he has decided that his mother is innocent and is moving forward in that reality.
“When we’ve looked everywhere and still don’t understand how the thing happened, I think we have to ask why it happened.”
He just can’t come up with any reason why his mother would have done it that seems to make any sense, and so errs on the side of believing that she didn’t.
In the end, Sandra is acquitted and released back into her life, but that doesn’t mean that things are just back to normal.
“You know, when you lose, you lose. But when you win, you expect some kind of reward… and there isn’t any. You leave empty-handed.”
Her world has changed; she has suffered the trauma of the trial, but more than that fears that her relationship with her son is forever damaged in a deep way. When she calls home after her release, she’s told that Daniel isn’t ready to see her just yet, and she is afraid to go home, too. And so instead she and her lawyers go to a long dinner. But she eventually must face her new life and return home.
In the end, we’ll never really know if Sandra killed Samuel or not (though those who believe that dogs are a good judge of character might see the very end of the film as a nod in favor of Sandra’s innocence.) The real important takeaway is the way the story asks us to take stock of our own connections in our day to day lives, and the mysterious, unknowable aspects of them that we can’t necessarily communicate but can feel. And how it asks us to take an honest look at the truths we decide on for ourselves every day, the beliefs we hold onto to build a reality around ourselves that we can bear to live in.