A journalist is interviewing Sandra in the mountain bay near Grenoble, where the writer lives with her husband Samuel and son Daniel.

The son goes out for a walk with Snoop, his dog for the blind: Daniel has in fact lost his sight due to an accident.

They have to interrupt the interview because music, to be exact Pimp by the Bacao Thythm & Steel Band, comes over from upstairs, put on repeat, at an increasingly loud volume, such that conversation is not possible.

Sandra justifies the volume by saying that her husband likes to listen to music while working.

Upon returning from the walk, the son finds his father lying on the ground and help is called. Death is ascertained and a full-fledged anatomy of the fall begins.

The first suspect is obviously Sandra, who resorts to an old lawyer friend for defense.

Samuel was working on the third floor, in the attic, to make a new room: could he have fallen? Did someone push him? Did he throw himself?

Everything is examined in detail: the roof on which the first blow to the back of the head occurred before the body had reached the ground; DNA testing on the same; height is also measured and the fall is simulated with a dummy.

However, everything seems inadequate to actually establish how the events happened therefore the trial will see a path of prosecution and defense based on various elements that will emerge in the course of appeals, testimony and further evidence.

Samuel had in fact made a habit of recording, even without his wife's knowledge, their discussions, and the son who is questioned more than once has to deny confessions as he believes he has been confused.

The situation becomes entangled and increasingly enigmatic as the difficult time Samuel was experiencing emerges. Oppressed by guilt over his son's accident and subsequent loss of vision for which he feels responsible, he was devoting much of his time to caring for Daniel thus taking away space from his writing and his serenity.

Claims that emerge from the last recorded discussion, to which, however, Sandra does not seem to give in.

A rather precarious relationship is thus outlined especially since the caring component often identifiable in the feminine here is worn by Samuel who by choice or necessity finds himself in a role now too frustrating in his eyes.

Sandra also had a brief affair with another woman that has now ended, however.

Elements upon elements are added to the courtroom debates where the son Daniel is always present, despite the fact that he is constantly flanked by a guardian who must safeguard him from any conditioning by his mother.

Any scientific and courtroom findings will prove insufficient to determine the truth of the facts until something unpredictable and surprising happens.

Justine Trier packs a surgical, careful and meticulous operation: the construction of the labyrinthine path that leads each time to a loss of certainties and the questioning of the new starting point will percolate up to the examination of the fall of such or supposed relationship.

A kind of Scenes from a Contemporary Marriage where the figure of the son nevertheless seems to have dictated its fate for better or worse.

Chopin's Prelude in E minor op. 28 is the soundtrack of the doubt that remains even as one must decide where to stand.Daniel is visually impaired and perhaps because of this a great listener without distraction with a disconcerting capacity for reflection.

While he does not grasp in his mother the reasons to kill, he senses in his father the possibility of suicide.

The theme of truth and guilt, of responsibility and the burden it entails, of professional dissatisfaction and frustration resulting in claims, collateral attempts at revenge, and above all the corrosive growing attitude of aversion or animosity toward someone, also called resentment are some of the elements that are prompted by the anatomical vision of a relationship that has lost its balance and is doomed to a free or conditional fall.

24-Oct-2023 by Beatrice