In 1990, Jens Soering and Elizabeth Haysom were found guilty of the murders of Haysom’s parents. Haysom, who testified against Soering, claimed that he had committed the crime alone, but at her urging. Soering initially confessed to this, but then quickly recanted his confession: he has maintained his innocence to this day. In prison, both Soering and Haysom became prolific writers, winning awards for their books and poetry. Revisiting the case decades later for The New Yorker, Nathan Heller found it impossible to know who really did what, because both Soering and Haysom had such literary minds.
The killer, or killers, “knew how expectations and a sense of rightness could be conjured by playing into common arcs of plot.” “At least one of the people implicated,” he concluded, “has been hiding the truth with a writer’s mind.” Writers are often favored suspects in whodunits—who, after all, could cook up a more diabolical plot? But, as Heller concludes, it is just as possible that the ability to spin a good tale could damn an innocent suspect by making them seem slick and untrustworthy.
Anatomy of a Fall, the new film by Justine Triet, is a riveting drama about the writer-as-suspect. It begins as a fairly straightforward murder mystery. Samuel, a writer and teacher, is found dead after falling from the attic of his house. At first, the fall seems to have been an accident, but the authorities find some suspicious blood spatter evidence that calls this into question. His wife Sandra, the only other person in the house at that time, is charged with his murder. Evidence comes out that suggests their marriage was not as happy as it seemed. Sandra’s skill and identity as a writer becomes a key issue in her trial, where the style of the fiction writer meets the language of the law.
Murder mysteries, and courtroom dramas especially, rely on good performances. They are tricky balancing acts: they should be deep and specific enough to draw the audience in, while still being enough of a cipher to leave some doubt about their guilt or innocence. It’s also difficult to play a writer on the screen: so much of it all is about inner life, about observing rather than acting, that it’s easy to rest on externalities and clichés: a tweedy jacket with elbow pads, a pretentious vocabulary, raging egotism. Actor Sandra Hüller eschews all of this, balancing hubris and vulnerability with convincing (but still mysterious) grace. When we first see Sandra, she’s being interviewed by a student about her work. She’s relaxed, a little boozy, and in her element. She answers questions confidently ( when she wants to), and is good at deflecting the ones she does with a kind of convivial, self-effacing charm.
Anatomy of a Fall is a riveting drama about the writer-as-suspect.After the unimaginable happens and the walls start closing in, Sandra silent and staunch, trying to be as clinical and detached as possible throughout the investigation. (This kind of affect can be a death blow to a woman on trial—”See how cold she is! How calculating!”) Yet her eyes shift and her face softens at moments when she realizes she’s becoming the prime suspect. Throughout she tries to maintain a facade of normalcy and levity for her son Daniel, it’s clear it comes at a cost. You can catch flickers of guilt about what she is putting her son through. There’s a poignant scene—one of the film’s few light moments—where Sandra blows off steam, sneaking a cigarette and joking with her lawyer. The camera swirls around them. There’s a beat of silence, then Sandra fervently tries to tell her lawyer that she is truly innocent. When the camera swings back and captures his studiously blank expression, she realizes that even her closest advocate is not sure about her story.
At Sandra’s trial, her writing career is used against her. Her normal ways of expressing herself become alien and alienating. Sandra believes that her skill as a writer will help her make her case, and that she can acquit herself based on her skills as a narrator. But a trial has its own language and ways of storytelling. Sandra’s words and demeanor suggest a sort of bohemian elitism. (Anatomy of a Fall takes some cues from Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s pioneering true crime documentary series The Staircase, where a writer is accused of killing his wife. His pompous, professorial demeanor comes off as insincere, and gets in the way of his defense.) Sandra is less cartoonishly pretentious, but her self possession and detachment can make her seem haughty and aloof, and insufficiently distraught. Worse still, Sandra has often said that her fiction is autobiographical, and passages of her novels are used against her in court.
Like any good novelist, Sandra looks for all the nuances and complexities in human relationships. She hopes, with her insight and power with words, to challenge the narrative of her marriage that the prosecution has scripted. She tries to illustrate the messy truth: that a marriage can be both happy and unhappy at the same time. Some issues between spouses are nagging constants, but not something you think about every day. Lots of good parts outweigh the bad ones. The thing that seems to rankle Sandra is that, in portraying her as someone angry enough to kill Samuel, the court suggests she lacked sympathy for her husband. It refuses the possibility that she could accept his baggage because she knew where he came from. After Samuel’s therapist testifies about how much Samuel resented Sandra and viewed her as a cause of his depression, Sandra notes that she could have another professional provide a counternarrative that would indict her husband as much as this one indicts her.
But the court is a place of competing narratives, where simplicity, clarity and consistency are the ultimate virtues. Sandra is at her most impassioned when she explains how she and Samuel disagreed about how to treat Daniel, who is visually impaired. Her reasoning has never been more clear, her demeanor never more sympathetic, and she has no idea how big a hole she’s digging for herself.
The back-and-forth, did-she-or-didn’t-she rhythms of the courtroom scenes are a drama of competing narratives and parsed words. (You can imagine how much fun a bunch of French lawyers have trying to define “seduction.”) But Anatomy of a Fall also examines writing from different angles. Writing itself has been one of the major strains on Sandra’s and Samuel’s marriage. It’s an old story: she’s successful, he isn’t. She proudly boasts that she can write anywhere at any time, he feels overwhelmed with family duties. (Does this evidence seem more damning because the expected gender roles are reversed?) The trial reaches a dramatic climax when it comes out that Samuel had secretly recorded many of his conversations with Sandra. (In an amusing twist, he was hoping to use these recordings as inspiration for his own novel.) The recording of one of their arguments is played in court, the film audience watches most of the encounter in a flashback. It’s an arresting, game-changing scene.
Without giving away too much, it’s striking how much the rift in their marriage is about writing. There are disputes about who gets to do it and when, who gets to write about what, and, inevitably, the brutal question of who’s better at it. It’s striking how much each spouse identifies as a writer, and the extent each sees each other (and loves, and hates, the other) through this lens. Writing is not just a form of communicating, but a commodity to be traded, or shared, or hoarded. And, just maybe, something worth killing for.
