‘Anatomy of a Fall’ review: If a man falls in the French Alps and no one is around to see him, did his wife do it?

A man is dead and his wife is the prime suspect. We’re brought in to a case that could have just as easily shown up on a Twitter post or reddit thread. As the case unfolds we get a small window into a broken relationship and are left to piece together the rest. And there’s a lot to piece together.

We never meet Samuel and instead are given a reconstruction based on recordings and the testimony of Sandra, their son, and acquaintances. Sandra is forced to testify in French, her third language. Their son Daniel is blind and inhabits a fundamentally different world than his sighted parents and it casts his testimony into question. No one in the family is able of truly understanding each other due to language, physical impairment, or communication skills.

And so by the end of case it’s not an unanswered question of whether Sandra did it or not, but an unanswered question of what do a mother and son do going forward in the face of what has to be a deeply changed relationship