'Sound of Falling' Review: This Cannes Opener Is One of the Most Grim Films About the Female Experience I've Ever Seen

The competition for Cannes’ Palme d’Or commences with Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, the first of 22 films that will screen in contention for the festival’s top prize. The only solely German production (six others are co-productions with other nations), Cannes 2025’s inaugural main competition film casts a dark shadow on the festival, not for its execution or creativity, but merely for its near obsession with building a world as bleak, hopeless, and desolate as possible. Focusing on four women ranging from childhood to early adulthood across four different time periods, if you didn’t know women suffered already, boy, does Schilinski make it clear.