Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet · 2023
A German novelist is tried for the murder of her husband after he is found dead in the snow outside their French chalet — the trial reconstructing their marriage through evidence that proves nothing and accuses everything. Justine Triet's Palme d'Or winner is about how courts tell stories and what truth can survive a legal proceeding.
Techniques Used
4 techniques identified in this film
Legal Theater
NarrativeThe use of courtroom proceedings as a space where the film's thematic arguments are made explicit through adversarial testimony and legal procedure.
How this film uses it
Triet uses the trial not to solve the murder but to dismantle the institution of marriage — each testimony and cross-examination revealing a different interpretation of the same relationship, the courtroom as a machine for producing competing narratives.
Unreliable Narrator
NarrativeA storytelling device in which the audience cannot determine whether the account being presented is accurate, because the narrator's perspective is partial, motivated, or compromised.
How this film uses it
Triet refuses to show the fall — the film's central event is reconstructed only through testimony, inference, and the conflicting interpretations of interested parties, leaving the question of what happened genuinely and permanently open.
Audience Truth Withholding
NarrativeA structural choice to deny the audience access to information that would resolve a central ambiguity, making the experience of uncertainty the film's subject.
How this film uses it
Triet gives the audience no privileged access to the truth — Sandra may be guilty, may be innocent, and the film's refusal to reveal which is its central argument about what legal systems and marriages can actually know.
Observational Restraint
NarrativeA filmmaking approach that withholds explanation, allowing behavior and environment to communicate character meaning without dialogue.
How this film uses it
Triet films Sandra with the same ambiguity the court extends to her — neither condemning nor exonerating, watching her react to testimony about her own marriage with a face that could mean anything.
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