What makes a monster? It’s a question we can consider from two perspectives (two of many possible). The first is those primordial things that make up evil: those pieces of the human condition that must be foreclosed such that a person can do monstrous things. The second involves an act of creation. What is it within our civilized society that seeks to identify and call out the bad of humankind? Who crafts the narratives that cast some as villains and others as victims, and through what contexts are these narratives codified and/or agreed upon? At least…agreed upon enough that stories with monsters become tropes that are legible to us, or agreed upon enough that guilty verdicts can be reached in homicide cases.

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall presents us with a contained incident (the eponymous fall) and a proceeding attempt by many parties to make sense of what happened (i.e., the anatomy). Ultimately, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is accused of and tried for her husband’s death, leading to a protracted and tense court battle in which Sandra’s entire character is called into question.

Within culture, we understand stories of crime to be complex and oftentimes unclear. There is also a desire to make sense of what is left unexplained, to interpret events to the point that we feel comfortable in identifying the guilty and the victimized as merely that. This is (in part) why true crime is the popular and undying industry that it is. In this process of attempted understanding, stories and interpretation and fact bleed into one, and people decide what they believe to be the truth.

Anatomy of a Fall fixates on belief and on evidence as referents to an unknowable reality. Belief, evidence, analysis, testimony, interpretation, pathos, logos, and ethos are all displayed in the court of law of this story to be divorced from truth (or, at least, absolute truth). But Triet provides us with these pieces all the same, and she does so in such a way that we are left not with closure, but with the weighty knowledge that the messiness of humanity is insurmountable. To an extent, we are all monsters of our own making – a concept so loaded it extends back to original sin (although, the film eschews the spiritual entirely and replaces it with a sociocultural phenomenon with its own sense of religious fervor: the reductive guise of logical certitude).

The courtroom of Anatomy of Fall, through this sense of construction, becomes something rarely seen in cinematic trials. We could compare it to another recent release, The Burial. That is a film which relies heavily on tried and true tropes of the courtroom drama that audiences are familiar with (and which, by and large, are contrivances for the sake of intrigue and excitement). The Burial is just fine as a film; it harks back to a type of courtroom drama that is not made very often these days. But Anatomy of a Fall is a completely different animal. The story is individualized in a way that makes the court case thrilling and frustrating and emotionally dense. Sandra Hüller, it should be mentioned, carries the character study at the heart of this trial beautifully, and hers is one of the best performances of the year.

Beyond the individual, though, Triet’s trial is one that questions the very nature of indictment. How are we taught to view high-profile subjects of the court? How does the individual abstract into an idea, an archetype? Why does it become so easy to label someone a monster? Anatomy of a Fall is packed with emotional density, cutting dialogue, and fantastic performances. The courtroom, for what it’s worth, is also gorgeously captured by Simon Beaufils, and the editing (Laurent Sénéchal) is exceptional. The film is a full package.

Anatomy of a Fall: A-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)