Exquisite and enthralling murder mystery gripping till the end

(MA15+, 152 minutes)

5 stars

As they must, it's the small details that matter on the day a man dies, suddenly and mysteriously, after falling from the upper floor of a chalet in the alps. In the background there are glorious mountains, in the foreground a family tragedy that has led to a dead body in the snow outside as the hunt for clues begins.

In the interior scenes before the death, a ball bounces down the chalet's stairs as a collie chases after it. It is distracting the woman who is being interviewed by a visiting journalist. As the camera interrogates their faces, searching for clues about their interaction, something begins to jar. Upstairs there is someone playing piano, loudly and forcefully, before a boy leaves the house on a walk with his dog. In total, it's not much to go on: we know there is violence to follow, and when it arrives, it arrives without warning.

It is heart-breaking that Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) comes across his father's body when he returns from his walk, though he is perhaps spared the worst, as he is partially blind. Whether Sam (Samuel Theis) tumbled from an attic window or from a balcony beneath becomes crucially important in the ensuing investigation and court case that sees the dead man's wife, Daniel's mother Sandra (German actor Sandra Huller), accused of murder.

Sandra can be read as a bisexual woman whose success as a writer has been won on the back of a put-upon husband who also yearns for literary success. Or as a woman mystified, hurt and angered by her partner's resentful behaviour, who refuses to carry the blame for his malaise and lack of productivity.

It's said that the director and co-writer Justine Triet avoided telling Huller whether her character was guilty of murder or not. The uncertainty has surely helped draw an extraordinarily deft performance from her. The screenplay was a collaboration between Triet and her partner Arthur Harari.

Furthermore, Sandra is compromised by being German, by being gay, or gay some of the time, and perhaps also by being the successful partner in a fraught marriage. As the dialogue slips between the English that Sandra is comfortable with and the French with which she is not, her slower and sometimes faltering French suggests she may have something to hide. The star of Zone of Interest is a formidable actor.

Huller's isn't the only remarkable performance here. As her friend Master Vincent, a lawyer, Swann Arlaud's performance alternates between compassion and scepticism.

Despite having only brief moments on screen in the re-enactment of the argument between Sam and Sandra the day before he dies, Theis also makes a formidable impression.

The subjectivity of expert opinion is also laid bare in Sandra's trial. The eagerness of members of the general public for scandal, the aggressive drive and snide manner of a court prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) and the partisan evidence of Samuel's psychoanalyst are all exposed under the film's forensic gaze.

The drama proceeds with confidence and precision until its final moments. Exquisitely well put together, it studies a murder trial from all possible angles and was a very deserving winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year.

This anatomy of a fall is as much a subtle dissection of legal processes as it is an inquiry into underlying community attitudes towards people who seem different, divergent or outsider. Life is always so much more complicated than the convenient labels bandied around, as this enthralling film so ably demonstrates.