This article appeared in the October 15, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski, 2025)

The Pre-Raphaelites knew: it’s all about the hair. In the many images of drowned women (Ophelia was a regular subject) painted by the 19th-century British artists known for their vivid realism, it’s the hair our eyes are drawn to: the long, flowing locks, lank and loose, with tendrils tumbling over the woman’s shoulders or floating, splayed out, in the water. These paintings are visions of sexual passivity and submission; the beautiful woman who drowns herself for love was a fetishistic fixation of 19th-century Europeans—not just poets and painters, but also the many middle-class people around the turn of the century who bought death masks of “L’Inconnu de la Seine,” an anonymous woman whose body was supposedly pulled from the Paris river. The drowned woman enables the spectator’s sentimental disavowal of sexual aggression; she is one of the ur-images of European patriarchy, and she haunts our representations of women’s suicides and the feminine death drive more generally.

Milagros Mumenthaler’s restrained drama The Currents and Mascha Schilinski’s brutal intergenerational memory piece Sound of Falling—both of which screened at the 63rd NYFF—revive the image of the self-drowned woman with a bracing literalism. In Sound of Falling, which moves among four generations of families—one pre–World War I, one during the Nazi era, one in the 1970s, and one contemporary—on an estate in northeast Germany, girls and women fall, dive, and trudge sullenly into the eel-infested Elbe river, their bodies illuminated by the sun rays piercing the water’s surface. But they refuse to drown, choosing instead forms of self-harm and disappearance that disallow any fantasy of eroticism. When we do see female corpses, they are nasty: a needle runs through a grandmother’s eyelids; a sister who has chosen death over rape is propped up on a bench for a macabre family photo.

The camerawork of Sound of Falling has a blurry, gauzy remove, but bursts of unplaceable sound underscore moments of emotional intensity with expressionistic force. The first historical scenes, of a farming family and their servants, evoke early uses of photography for spiritualism and the occult, and the ghostly atmosphere deepens as Schilinski and DP Fabian Gamper’s camera zeroes in on bodily wounds and violence—brothers with amputated legs, maids sterilized for repeated rape, eels with their bared teeth sunk into human flesh. As these examples suggest, Schilinski and her collaborators are interested most of all in phallic weaponry, which makes it something of a shock when, in the contemporary scene of a bohemian family renovating the house, a woman gently tugs her husband’s penis out of his jeans. In these sections set in the more recent past, focused on adolescent girls and their loving but uncomprehending mothers, the film loses some steam without the active threat of the almost archaic violence of the first two generations, but continues to coalesce into resonant imagery—a mother trapped in a car parked between two trees; girls pulled on a mattress across a floor, as if on a raft.

Reference to the Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia is more pointed in The Currents. Mumenthaler’s film unfolds with a smooth elegance, even glossiness, that belies its political punch. Isabel Aimé González Sola has long and beautiful hair, and when her character, Lina, stops washing it, it’s a jolt to see it become greasy and matted, gelled into a helmet and tangled in knots. Lina’s ambiguous suicide attempt, shot with the cold grace of a ballet—after accepting a professional award in Geneva, she walks through the city, crosses a bridge, climbs suddenly over the railing, and jumps into the river—occurs in the first few minutes of the film. The rest focuses on what happens after she returns to her husband and young daughter and their upscale home in Buenos Aires, where she stops showering completely, incapable of tolerating the feeling or even the sound of running water.

The shock when Lina pulls her dirty hair off her neck to reveal a red rash on her scalp is eclipsed only by the scene that follows it: after weeks (or longer) of being unable to bathe, Lina finds herself in the back room of a hair salon, where she is fitted with a face mask and put under general anesthesia so that the beautician—whom she knows from her past—can wash her body and hair. It took me a minute to realize that there’s novocaine in the salon because customers go there for medicalized beauty procedures, commonplace among contemporary bourgeois women. It’s a scene that shifts The Currents decisively from a character study about a privileged woman’s inexplicable alienation toward a consideration of class-stratified women’s labor that echoes in the film’s penultimate sequence, when Lina goes to visit her mother in a working-class suburb.

The final scenes of Mumenthaler’s film put me in mind of another 19th-century representation of a cossetted woman’s almost-drowning: the one in Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll House, which includes the playwright’s scathing critique of the by-then cliché of a woman’s suicide by water. In A Doll House, protagonist Nora fantasizes about drowning herself as a sacrifice of love to her husband; when he proves himself utterly unworthy, she decides instead to start a new life without him and their children. Lina, unlike Nora, changes her mind on her way out, returning to her screaming child; the final images of mother and daughter are as emotionally ambiguous as Lina’s near-death, but there’s a fragile peace in them. There’s no such calmness at the end of Sound of Falling, as the younger daughter of the contemporary family jumps suddenly from the loft of a barn. If the end of Schilinski’s film points to the eruption of unconscious trauma through generations, Mumenthaler’s evokes something less spectacular but no less essential: sometimes not dying is the best revenge.

Shonni Enelow is a writer and critic, and a professor of English at Fordham University.