Film Review: Anatomy of a Fall

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | March 16, 2024

If I had tried to convince you last week that Anatomy of a Fall was worth 2 hours and 32 minutes of your time, you may have ignored the rec. That’s because we, the American movie culture, don’t often venture outside our comfort zone when it comes to European films with occasional subtitles.

But maybe now, hot on the heels of five Oscar nominations including Best Picture and a win for Best Original Screenplay (more on that later), I can convince you not only to watch it, but to pay particular attention to how much it owes to our home state of Michigan.

As conceived by director Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, Anatomy of a Fall is a maddeningly ambivalent whodunnit. And for audiences worldwide, the tension of an unsolved murder is proving easily translatable and relatable, especially in a film that is almost one-third English. The film requires you to talk to someone, anyone, who might have seen it in hopes of connecting with your own point of view of the story.

Led by actress Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall is a masterpiece of perceptions and realities. Her on-screen plight as a wife accused of murder is riveting as she fights within a performative French justice system and fails to follow an attorney desperate to defend her.

In Triet’s methodical and logical hands, the film lures you into a state of alluring hypnosis where everything and nothing is true simultaneously. Filled with marital truths that are so raw and unforgiving, Anatomy of a Fall is also a strangely relatable story with an exacting script that pulls you in like a black hole.

Performances from actors Swann Arlaud (Sandra’s only friend and confidante after the mysterious death of her husband) and Milo Machado-Graner (her son and now key witness in the trial of his father’s murder) will also shake you.

But the excellence of the film is not the only reason we’re choosing to write about it this week. Triet has not been coy with clues, and within the title itself you’ll find another international blockbuster that inspired it.

Anatomy of a Murder became a best-selling novel just in time for judge, attorney, and famous fly fisherman John D. Voelker (pen name Robert Traver) of the Upper Peninsula to pay his long overdue bills. The struggling writer took a real life murder trial from his storied past and turned it into a page-turner that sold four million copies in over 20 languages worldwide.

When controversial Austrian director Otto Preminger finally grabbed the movie rights in 1958, he knew he had the most compelling courtroom drama of his time in his hands. He rushed to produce it in Ishpeming, Marquette, and Big Bay to ensure “authenticity.”

The film infused over $500,000 to a region desperately in need of jobs, and it was the first Hollywood movie ever produced entirely on location. Anatomy of a Murder premiered for locals of the U.P. secretly before debuting officially from Columbia Pictures at the United Artists’ Theatre in Detroit. From there it became a sensation and went on to become one of the most referenced crime films of all time. It was nominated for seven Oscars, winning none.

German writer/director Triet has been open about the homage she owes to Preminger’s opus, and fans of the 1959 film will find several visual overlaps she plays with deep within the tightly crafted narrative. After watching Anatomy of a Fall, as a Michigander you’ll be rewarded for following Triet’s lead and taking in the other film, too.

To be clear, Anatomy of a Fall is wholly original and not an adaptation of the Voelker/Traver drama. But they share similar tensions and attention to undeniable realities, exploring the duality of good and evil in the world and how uneasy it is to accept.