Sound of Falling and The Secret Agent: Uncovering and Protecting History
Review by In the Frame participant Guuleed Ismail
In the Frame is a program that fosters inquiry, reflection, and an appetite for cinema. As part of our In the Frame program, up to four emerging film critics had the opportunity to watch, reflect on and review films in the Perth Festival Lotterywest Films 2025 – 26 season.
When we try to remember something, we recall the last version of that memory. In a never ending game of telephone, the more distant the memory, the less reliable our recollection is. Historical archives, collective experiences, and family media help to ensure stories are not lost to time. Throughout Sound of Falling, characters in voiceover are recalling the past, and while the details of a face or name diminish, the impact of those memories remain.
Mascha Schilinski's Sound of Falling (2025) is a spectral account of four generations of women living in a rural German farmhouse. Alma (Hanna Heckt), Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) are our access to the 1910s, 1940s, 1980s and 2020s respectively. Despite decades separating these women, there is a repetition in their lives. The same phrases and conversations resurface, as well as psychological wounds.
This Cannes’ Jury Prize winning film was born from a creative retreat to Germany’s Altmark region by Mascha Schilinski and writing partner Louise Peter. Not only was the farmhouse in the film discovered during this trip, but so was a century old photo of three women. The photograph sparked curiosity about what their lives may have been like, leading to a screenplay for the haunting, impressionistic arthouse film.
The absence of women’s history in Germany informed Schilinski and Peter’s research and is a defining feature of their labyrinthian coming of age drama. Women living on the farmstead are pushed into rigid moulds, flirting with death and desire to escape their inhibited lives. Erika is fascinated by her uncle Fritz who is an amputee, leading her to mimic his injury by taking his crutches and binding her leg. She also observes Fritz resting in his room, of which her sister Irm and Fritz himself are aware.
Alma replicates a post-mortem photo of her doppelgänger, with the same outfit, shoes pointing inward, and head tilting sideward. Her youthful curiosity leads her to witness distressing actions by the men of her family, a premature introduction to what could plague her future.
Lenka is captivated by an older girl named Kaya living on the property. She shadows Kaya’s every move, from eating the same food, to daring activities at the river. Meanwhile Nelly, Lenka’s younger sister, is struggling with feelings of isolation, exasperated by Kaya taking Lenka’s attention. Angelika tests intimate boundaries with her cousin Rainer and uncle Uwe to reclaim sexual agency and puts herself at risk swimming across a river splitting East and West Germany. When a recursive image of a dead eel’s mouth pressed against a hand is given context, it becomes clearer what connects Angelika to her mother Irm, and in the greater context of the film, what connects these women who called the farmstead home. Mascha Schilinski uses several recurring motifs throughout the film, trusting the viewer’s patience in understanding their place in the narrative. Whether we are plunged into the river or crawling through hay piles, the reward of this film lies in its steady revealing of itself.
The ensemble cast provide an array of emotionally charged performances. The lost glimmer in a girl’s eye that’s seen too much. The frustration of a teenager objectified by family. The pained laughter of a mother forced to desperate ends. Casting was a year-long process involving 1400 children with the goal to find faces which fit their corresponding eras. The result was a remarkable blend of young actors both inexperienced and accomplished. With a film as unconventional as this, it’s fitting that populating the screen took a similar route.
A threatening force surrounds the farmland in Sound of Falling. The barn interior resembles a gateway to hell, a nearby riverbank draws people into dark waters, and the house is haunted by ghosts. This film’s suffocating atmosphere is achieved through Fabian Gamper’s voyeuristic, dreamlike cinematography, and eerie sound design, often making use of whistles, wind and white noise. These horror-like components of the film accompany a devastating depiction of intergenerational trauma caused by patriarchal cruelty. Upon first viewing, I was immediately reminded of Mirror (1975) and The Virgin Suicides (1999), the prior a shining example of capturing the dreamy essence of memory, the latter a contemporary classic of the challenging girlhood experience.
Limitations of memory, and the importance of preserving history are recurring themes of Sound of Falling. Alma and Erika witness the disturbing treatment of farm maids Berta and Trudi, revealing that they were sterilised to be less threatening to men. Angelika sees her mother Irm subject to embarrassing situations, and as with Lenka 40 years later, is victim to unwelcome advances by male family or their friends. In the face of this, their shared route is suffering in silence. They conceal their cravings and ailments, longing to be someone else or disappear. Experiences such as these live only in memory, as opportunities for women to speak for themselves were sparse.
Sound of Falling presents the ache for connection and freedom as a common experience across generations. It points us to the gaps in a nation’s history, and amplifies the voices of women whose lives were, and continue to be marred by indignity, violence and erasure.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (2025), is another film centring themes of memory and preserving history. The political thriller set in Recife follows Armando (Wagner Moura), a professor avoiding persecution by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970s. Occasionally the film flashes to present day, focusing on research student Flávia (Laura Lufési) who interprets tapes and articles of Armando with a web of resistance fighters. Her freedom to research and establish their history, ensures they are not forgotten as the military regime desired. Firmly rooted in 1970’s cinematic language, Filho has even cited the Australian classic Wake in Fright (1971) as an inspiration for his love letter to a cherished decade in film.
The Secret Agent opens with a body covered by cardboard at a fuel station. Armando stops by and hesitantly accepts service from the attendee, who explains that the body has been left to rot as the station owners and police ignore the matter. At the conversation’s close, a police car pulls into the station. The officers, one in blood-stained uniform, didn’t know about the body but instead arrived to shake down Armando for money. It is this opening sequence, with a forgotten body at the mercy of wildlife and self-serving authorities which provides the scenery of great mischief and misery.
Evgenia Alexandrova’s cinematography reflects the vibrant, joyous heart of Recife in the summer. Mangoes are makeshift footballs, drinks are flowing, and everyone is out dancing to samba during Carnival. Despite the amusement, an oppressive undercurrent is clear through the eyes of Armando and the cast of characters in this film.
Brazil’s military regime seeks to warp the nation’s collective memory and history, and in doing so shrink the public’s perception of their actions. Filho and Moura’s working relationship was fuelled by their opposition to the recent Bolsonaro far-right government, which led to the receiving of death threats and character attacks. The Secret Agent reflects on Brazil’s oppressive governments, from both Filho and Moura’s childhood and as recently as 4 years ago.
The psychological impact of the dictatorship is felt across generations in Brazil. With attacks on enemies of the state being commonplace, many children lost one or both of their parents, leaving them in the care of grandparents or other surviving family. This trauma of disrupted childhood is carried in the hearts and minds of many living in the country today, as the dictatorship only officially ended 40 years ago. A sad truth spoken in film is that students with access to records can know more about a mother or father than the child ever did. Armando fears becoming just another victim of the dictatorship, where a brief news article about your death is your loudest evidence of life. He is allocated work at an identity card office and searches for the only paper proving his late mother existed. He hopes to reunite with his son Fernando, who lives with his grandparents after his mother Fatima (Alice Carvalho) was killed. Danger lurks at every turn for Armando and his associates, who only have each other to rely on for support and protection.
The Secret Agent is infused with a celebration of cinema and storytelling as refuge from the precarious conditions under dictatorship. Armando’s father-in-law Mr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) works as a projectionist at Cinema São Luiz. After a dead shark with a swallowed human leg is found, and while a news story about “The Hairy Leg” grips readers, the cinema replays Jaws (1975) to entertain the anxious masses. The Hairy Leg was a guise by journalists to evade censorship when reporting acts of violence by the military. This trojan horse mechanism delivering news within local myth, allowed for actions of the dictatorship to be known to the public, and evaluated by future generations.
In contrast to the masculine operatives of the regime, Kleber Mendonça Filho highlights women as figureheads of the resistance. Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) is a charismatic, unfiltered safe house operator who protects Armando, refugees of the Angolan civil war and targets of the military. At 77 years old, she has lived through the entirety of 20th century Brazilian politics and lived in fascist Italy during WWII. Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) is a weary yet fierce leader of the resistance, making sure to tape record the exploits of the powers that be. These recordings survive 50 years and make it into the hands of students living under a democratic government. To be against the state means to perpetually fight erasure, and both Dona Sebastiana and Elza are looked to as examples of bravery in the face of these overwhelming odds.
The cast exhibit brilliantly controlled performances, especially through Wagner Moura, recipient of Cannes’ Best Actor Award. Through Moura we recognise Armando’s struggle with loss, his fear of death, and barely contained rage against the powers that seeks to end him. It is expected that the lead of a film such as this is willing and able to harm the antagonists, however Filho writes Armando to be an unarmed, more reserved character representing the common man’s wish for survival.
The Secret Agent speaks to the importance of the fight against oppression, at home and abroad. Protecting a nation’s history in dark times so it does not go ignored is an essential tool of resistance, and while history is said to repeats itself, that statement is not exclusive to the negative chapters.