Let's Break Down Who Did It In ANATOMY OF A FALL
The biggest spoiler of this movie is that there are no spoilers.
In Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, a black screen flickers in that sweet spot between credits and feature presentation. It stays for a few seconds then flits away quickly enough to feel subconscious.
It holds a web address and a question: didshedoit.com
Then you’re thrown into the beautiful mountain-side chalet where our protagonist Sandra’s husband will die from an extreme yet oddly positioned fall.
You’re so curious about the external cross-reference to the film’s thesis—yes, a question as its thesis—that it stays in your brain through every scene.
In the moments when you are paying attention in the movie, asking yourself the same question—did she do it?—you remind yourself of the website.
Anatomy of a Fall is a movie about a couple. Both of them are writers. One of them is successful. They have a son who was blinded in an accident when he was four years old. One day, Sandra, the successful author, is interviewed by a young woman about her work. (Sandra Hüller plays the eponymous character who the writer/director Justine Triet emulated when creating the film.)
Music blares playing a steel pan version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” The music, controlled by her husband, grows louder until Sandra and the interviewer cut the interview short before it starts.
The son goes outside with his dog Snoop. When he returns, he and his dog Snoop (a phenomenal actor) discover the husband and father dead in the snow.
Sandra runs out after hearing her son scream, maybe a beat or two later than she should. That depends how you feel about Sandra.
As the movie moves into the court case and divulges secrets of Sandra and her deceased husband’s relationship, the movie becomes a Rorschach test of its audience. Did he fall from the window? Was he pushed?
Lawyers come forward to propose evidence on blood splatter and physical positioning that feels as theoretical as a Only Murders in the Building brainstorm. The French lawyers are vicious as tabloids when dictating a picture of a blindly ambitious woman or her potentially suicidal husband.
The truth is that there are no answers.
As a court supervisor says to the blind son before he is due to testify in court, there are times when the answer is ambiguous, and you can choose the truth you want to believe, the truth you can live with.
Trust me when I say this is worth your watch. There are some courtroom shots where the cameras do a tonally misaligned zoom-in that gives a Parks and Rec mockumentary flair that’s distracting, but the careful truth veiling by Triet is a Rubix cube missing one wall of color.
One common lore about this, repeated in multiple interviews, is that Hüller asked if her character was guilty or not, and Triet refused to let her know the entire duration of the shoot. Hüller still doesn’t know whether or not the fictional version of Sandra committed the crime. Hüller told The Hollywood Reporter,
Justine never told me, and I never decided myself. I quickly realized that this film is not so much about if she did it or not. It’s more about how we feel about her and how our feelings toward her change with this or that information that we get about her.
Now let’s get back to that website, didshedoit.com.
Every visitor to this page submits a “yes” or “no” vote with a written response on whether they think Sandra killed her husband.
When I first walked out of the theater, the results were nearly split between yes and no. A majority of the viewer-submitted thoughts arguing Sandra as the killer were “she sus as hell.” I kid you not, I saw this answer at least four times.
Going through these same responses today, there’s a stark divide. At the time of this writing, it leans 60% “no” and 40% “yes” roughly, though the “yes” written thoughts are longer than those defending Sandra.
Here are some of the responses from movie-goers who assumed Sandra killed her husband (direct quotes in italics):
Come on… COME ON!!…
she so did it
I don’t trust her
Because
Bad vibes bruh
only thing that makes sense
idk
who else could it be
She was German.
no
The vibes
Slay (hilarious)
cherchez la femme
“Cherchez la femme” is a trope in French detective narratives that means “search for the woman.”
These are selective answers. There are answers on both the “yes” and “no” side of the website that cite a scene or moment from the movie to justify their decision. I’ve withheld these to prevent spoilers connected to the plot, because the slow reveal of Sandra and her layers as a mother and wife is the best mystery of the film.
Despite the documentary film style, Anatomy of a Fall places the audience in the detective seat with enough clues to justify one side or the other. It calls on us to do what we tend to do often. If the truth seems too obtuse, lean on your implicit biases, as the court supervisor suggests.
This architectured ambiguity, anchored by Hüller’s performance, is an insane feat. “I think it was not the intention of the movie [to be a whodunit] because the movie is based on the lack of images, on the lack of things. You lack of things. So you fantasize the thing,” Triet says in Slate.
In an art mirroring life moment, the Slate interviewer Dan Kois is locked out of his own interview, left to imagine the gaps and trust whether or not he received everything he needed, when Triet and her French translator go back and forth without in French.
This movie can be rewatched multiple times the same way someone would read a detective novel to see how the clues were engineered—but the clues are less significant than the gaps left behind and how we decide to fill them in ourselves.
Anatomy of a Fall is currently playing in select theaters.