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What does murder sound like? In Justine Triet’s new film “Anatomy of a Fall,” it sounds like an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.,” which plays on a loop during the pivotal scene of this murder mystery.

Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning French courtroom drama about a wife accused of her husband’s murder is full of these offbeat details: without hard evidence, investigators set out on increasingly trivial hunts in search of answers. The results are supposedly forensic experiments that border on madness, like the police trying to determine the exact volume of “P.I.M.P.” at the time of the husband’s death.

These acts of due diligence might comfort law enforcement, but when tragedies affect the people closest to us, uncertainty is harder to handle. “Anatomy of a Fall” is about the things we don’t know about the people we love and how we can cope with the mystery of each person’s mind. Half legal thriller and half intimate family drama, the film’s narrative momentum comes from what it leaves out rather than what is shown.

The film centers around the death of a professor, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), who falls out of the third-story window of his home in the French Alps. He is discovered by his son, Daniel Maleski (Milo Machado Graner), who is visually impaired and can’t see the crime scene. The only other person in the house at the time of his death was his wife Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a famous novelist, who has no alibi and claims she was asleep.

With no way to prove whether Samuel fell, jumped or was pushed, police and lawyers dive into the gritty details of the family’s personal life in search of answers. Voyter’s attorney, an old friend named Vincent Renzi (Swann Arnaud), frames the death as a tragic suicide, citing her husband’s history of depression and failure to succeed as a writer. The prosecution sees it as a murder committed by a bitter wife looking to escape an unhappy marriage.

Neither of these readings is fully supported by the contradictory facts presented in the film, and both are unprovable. The film’s American distributor, Neon, plays a message before theatrical screenings of the film that encourages audiences to vote online at didshedoit.com about whether Voyter committed the crime. As of this writing, 34% of viewers think Voyter is guilty, and 66% say she is innocent.

While this healthy disagreement is a good sign of the film’s rigor, “Anatomy of a Fall” is too interesting of a movie to be reduced to a simple debate about its ending. The intrigue and artistry of this film are not in its outcomes but in the elegance of its methods.

The film is beautifully shot by Triet and cinematographer Simon Beaufils, who draw a deep sense of warmth from the wooden tones of the family’s home, a feeling that is made slightly sinister by its contrast to the snowy region where her family lives. Their work on the courtroom scenes, which take up a significant portion of the movie, is deliberate and versatile enough to hold the audience’s interest as the two-and-a-half-hour film enters its final stretch.

The camera is restrained and unflashy, often relying on simple zooms and close-ups. Triet lets the things within the frame — great performances, intricate architecture and breathtaking snowy vistas — do the talking.

By the last hour or so, Voyter’s guilt or innocence has become something of a secondary issue: audiences have too little evidence to come to a conclusion and the movie conditions you to give up looking for certainty. Instead, the film becomes about the seeds of doubt that remain with fictional characters and audience members alike.

Hüller gives one of the best performances of the year so far as Voyter, bringing a sense of mystery, sarcasm, passion, tenderness and wit to her indecipherable character. Hüller’s testimonies during the courtroom scenes are masterful pieces of acting, never betraying the true feelings behind the many figurative masks she wears: a concerned mother, a distraught wife, a literary master and an innocent woman.

The genius of her performance is that she shows the audience exactly how she creates and wears these masks — she and her lawyers discuss at length how she can come across as the best mother possible — but still manages not to give away if she is truly innocent. It’s an incredible, impossible trick to pull off, and yet she does.

Her best scene comes at the end of the film when the court plays an audio recording recovered from her husband’s flash drive. Triet cuts to a flashback of the conversation while it plays in front of the court, which is the first scene where Maleski appears alive. It takes place the day before his death.

Until this point in the film, the couple’s marriage had been portrayed as tense but at least outwardly loving, with their biggest hurdle being Maleski’s feelings of guilt about the accident that caused Daniel to lose his sight. In this scene, that narrative collapses as the couple throws plates, breaks down over infidelity and trades accusations of being a bad parent. The scene is a long, fierce and beautifully written exchange of dialogue that is refreshing in its realism.

The prosecution takes this as a sign of Voyter’s guilt but like most things about “Anatomy of a Fall,” the connection isn’t that simple. Since the tape is an audio recording, only she knows what really happened after the yelling stopped and the physical fighting began. For all the court can tell, Maleski is being violent and Voyter is defending herself. Just like Maleski’s murder, it’s her word against nobody’s.

“Anatomy of a Fall” is sharply directed and contains some of the best performances of the year, including a masterclass from Sandra Hüller. Its conversation-sparking intrigue, depth of characters, provocative questions and daring formal experimentation with audio make it one of the most exciting releases in a long time.

Published on November 1, 2023 at 9:16 pm