Cert - 18, Run-time - two hours, 35 minutes

Director - Mascha Schilinski

Four generations of women are haunted by isolation and secrets in the walls of the same farmhouse.

Separated by 110 years the four women, each at different stages of their lives, at the centre of Sound Of Falling constantly appear to be on the verge of a shudder. Not from the ghosts trapped in the walls of the farmhouse they all live in, but from the lingering traumas they carry. Each witnesses veiled secrets through the cracks in the doors, the changing face of each room; made to feel more isolated from the family and world around them.

Mascha Schilinski's camera intimately glides through the bodies in each scene. Getting up close to the emotion and stillness in each moment without feeling invasive or manipulative. It's perhaps the only ghost present in the film, and an observant one at that. Moving subtly across the faces of the increasingly isolated characters, and adding to out connection with them.

This is a film that's a quiet, slow burn (although one that doesn't feel its run-time) without a meditative feeling. A century-spanning generational study rather than a single character. We see the leads (Hanna Hekt as 1910s 7-year-old Alma, Lea Drinda and Lea Urzendowsky as 1940s and 80s teenagers Erika and Angelika respectively and Laeni Geisler as modern day adult Lenka) carrying their emotions, at different stages of expressing and understanding. Thoughts and feelings are often held in their eyes, let out in glances and looks away; moments alone.

Urzendowsky particularly gives a standout performance as a teenager seemingly on the edge of everything. Seeking escape amongst sex-based judgement and presumptions from family. You can feel her both drifting and being pushed away from those around her, floating in her state of isolation. Her strand could play out as a coming-of-age story, but is subverted into a tale of someone almost losing themselves in the fog of loneliness and frustrations caused by those around them by Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peters.

Secrets, intimacy and judgement are factors in all the lives we see playing out. Blending together both thematically and in the non-linear editing, without feeling busy or jumpy, helped by the slow pacing. It's this pacing that means that Sound Of Falling certainly won't be for everyone, but for those it does work for there's a quietly engaging film that moves with as much effect and subtlety as Schilinski's camera.

With the slightest of movements it cuts to the core of the minds and feelings of the leads as they break down the walls of both the home they share over more than a century and the faces around them. Each carries an emotional weight which they carry physically and is maintained even as they, and the home around them, unravel. There's a haunted weight carried by the film, too, yet the only present ghost appears to be an observant, unobtrusive camera.

Four stars