Note: The following review is taken from my Letterboxd profile.

Wow. Anatomy of a Fall is probably tied with Past Lives as my favorite film from last year (if not slightly edging it out). Justine Triet weaves a heavy, complicated, and often infuriating tale of misogyny in the legal system.

A mother’s husband has died, and the only witness is her blind son. What follows is her name and life getting dragged through the dirt as lawyers pick at arguments and her/her husbands work for any hint that she may have done it. Worse, she’s a non-native speaker and nobody even so much as *tries* to speak to her in her native tongue.

It’s complex storytelling with layers upon layers to work through, a crime that is just ambitious enough to go either way, and some of the cleanest, most traditional filmmaking I’ve seen in ages. This film could’ve come out during the era of the legal drama (think the late seventies with Kramer vs Kramer, all the way through the early nineties) and, not only do I think it it would’ve been almost identical to the film we got, I think it would’ve still been able to go toe-to-toe with the big dogs. There’s a scene that occurs right before the final act that mirrors an opening scene (and earlier mentioned incident) and… wow. The way it kicks a major shift in one characters perception of what’s going on, and the depths of the performance that it brings out of the actor—people are gonna talk about that for years to come (or should.)

Shame it’s discourse seems to largely circle around people being mad that it landed Triet a nomination over Gerwig for Barbie; there’s a strong sense of irony for the movie about a woman not being allowed to tell her side of the story due to the mechanizations of a loud, flashy legal system being accused of butting out the blaze, technicolor Barbie (a movie that’s not bad by any stretch of the word, but felt more like an introductory seminar to many of the same themes and ideas that Anatomy felt like a term paper on.)