Feature film review: Anatomy of a Fall 

• Neon Films

We know that the murder trial at the center of co-writer/director Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall exists in something close to our real world, because we see that it has become a media sensation. Snippets of TV coverage show people almost gleefully wrestling with the legal matter at hand: Did novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) murder and push her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) from the window of their French chalet, or was it an accident, or was it a suicide? The details are almost too enticing, from Sandra's bisexuality, to the involvement as a witness of their 11-year-old visually-impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), to the way Sandra's books so often borrow from her life. A legal case might ostensibly be about finding out factually what happened, but in the real world, it's more complicated than that. It's about what we're likely to believe happened, and why.

In the age of true-crime podcasts and documentary series, Anatomy of a Fall serves as kind of a bracing counterpoint to the notion that all it takes to uncover guilt or innocence is an intrepid enough investigation. This is a story about what we do with uncertainty—how we process it, how desperately we need to be free of it, and how the story of an event might ultimately prove more persuasive than anything else.

Triet and her co-writer/real-life partner Arthur Harari do parcel out plenty of breadcrumbs about the events leading up to Samuel's death, feeding into the notion that this might actually be a whodunnit. We learn the backstory involving the accident that took Daniel's sight, and Samuel's feelings of guilt that might have given him a cause for self-harm. Sandra backtracks, contradicts her own early statements, then ultimately admits to lying about facts that might tend to be incriminating. Then there is a recording that emerges of an argument between Sandra and Samuel the day before his death, one that emphasizes the heightened tensions between them and indicates a physical confrontation where it's uncertain who is striking whom.

But as tempting as it is to try put the puzzle pieces together and draw conclusions, that's not the matter at the heart of Anatomy of a Fall. That aforementioned argument recording captures a dispute between the husband and wife about the fractures in their relationship—whether Sandra is being an equal partner as a parent, who is responsible for Samuel's inability to launch his own career as a writer, even the details of their sex life. Triet and Harari deliberately craft it so that there's no clear villain in this scenario; from their own perspective, each participant is in the right, and sees the other as the unreasonable party. While the argument certainly presents a less binary question than "did Sandra or did she not commit murder," it draws into focus how much our sense of right and wrong is subjective, and how we need to tell ourselves the stories that allow us to feel most at ease with ourselves.

That notion is perhaps most evident in the character of Daniel, wonderfully played by Graner. Faced with a cascade of facts about his parents and the messiness of their relationship, as well as the haunting question of whether his mother killed his father, Daniel begins imagining scenes of what took place, which Triet inserts from his point of view. As Daniel's court-appointed caretaker suggests to him at one point, when faced with this kind of situation, a person generally decides which of two possible scenarios they're going to believe, with the facts bending and molding themselves around that decision rather than the other way around.

A few other bits and pieces get in the way of this central idea, including the history between Sandra and her defense attorney, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), but Triet is wise enough to make the trial itself the engine driving the narrative. And as it becomes clear from the theatrical behavior of Vincent and the prosecutor, it's evidence of what every trial attorney understands: You're not telling a jury facts, you're telling them a story. Anatomy of a Fall wrestles with how hard it is for us not to turn complicated cases of violence, passion and sadness into stories. Ultimately, Triet knows that there's no such thing as an ambiguous ending, because we're going to decide we know what happened.