In recent months, I’ve been falling down a Sound of Falling rabbit hole. Even though the mesmerising, experimental drama is 148 minutes long, I’ve watched it four times: at the back of a cinema, and again near the front; on my laptop in the morning, with a coffee, and again in bed, just before falling asleep, when my brain was in a dreamy headspace. The 31,000-word screenplay by the director, Mascha Schilinski, and her co-writer, Louise Peter, is so comprehensive that it’s practically a fifth viewing.

“Do you enjoy it?” Schilinski asks me, looking quizzical. “Or is it painful because you don’t get it?” I explain to the 41-year-old German director that I’ve appreciated the film more upon each viewing, especially when I can recognise the flashforwards and rhyming images. “It depends on if you’re looking at it with your heart,” she says. “You discover more if you watch it two or three times. But if you have access to the emotions, once can be enough.” When I wonder aloud if I lack access to my emotions, she interjects to add, “That’s not what I wanted to say!”

Set on a German farm across four timelines, Sound of Falling is a non-linear, often nightmarish film about the circularity of violence and misogyny. With each section following a young woman in peril, it’s effectively a coming-of-age drama but without the nostalgia attached to the genre. In the 1910s, 7-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) fantasises about death while relatives perish around her and maids are sterilised against their will. In the 1940s, 17-year-old Erika (Lea Drinda) contemplates drowning herself. In the 1980s, 16-year-old Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) battles away a love triangle with her male cousin and uncle. Lastly, in the present era, 12-year-old Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) starts to notice the elongated stares she receives from older men.

But Sound of Falling, which jumps around like a mixtape of scenes, doesn’t make any of its plot machinations easy to follow. There’s no onscreen text to indicate time jumps or a new setting. The dialogue might not correspond with the images on screen, and when it does, often it’s something enigmatic like: “When I see a door handle, I know exactly what it tastes like, though I’ve never licked one.” Instead, the film resembles how incidents, both minor and traumatic, are stored in the mind, or perhaps inherited from older generations. Shot on grainy celluloid, a character’s recollections are sometimes so hazy that a face will be blurred.

“The film looks into the inner lives of the characters, and for that reason it’s quite elliptical and fragmented,” says Schilinski, who mostly speaks in English but occasionally uses an interpreter. “There are lots of skips back and forth. There are plantings and payoffs, and echoes through time. For me, it’s a film about memory itself, and how fragile it is. The way I imagined it, it’s all these people who lived on this farm, but a billion years later they’re remembering this. Certain images appear, but you don’t know if they’re appearing for the first or last time. And so it evokes this melancholy about your own finiteness.”

She clarifies that the trauma isn’t related to the rural farm in Altmark, which is where she’s speaking to me on Zoom today. (She doesn’t live there; she’s working on an art project.) “I was focused on what passes through our body over time. What affects us and shapes us, even before we’re born, that we can’t quite access ourselves. I’m not talking about ghosts. I’m not talking about the house itself being alive. It’s us.”

We’re speaking in early March, a day before Oscar voting closes and the film comes out in UK cinemas. However, Sound of Falling was, incorrectly, not nominated for an Oscar. At Cannes, where the film won the Jury Prize, it was expected to become an awards contender, hence the March release date. Over time, though, it’s likely proved too challenging for casual viewers who prefer their arthouse films about intergenerational trauma to be more overtly comedic, like Sentimental Value.

It wasn’t our intention to do a film about the female gaze. But then we found so many tiny, untold stories of violence that became overwhelming

Still, Sound of Falling is playful, even if its themes are as dark as the black rectangles on either side of the claustrophobic frame and its 1.33 aspect ratio. A buzzing fly is suggested to be a time-travelling insect. Characters frequently break the fourth wall to unnerving effect, like when Erika is smacked by her brother then turns to the camera to grin. Praising the film, The New Yorker called Schilinski a “prankster”, a word that provokes a confused reaction from the director. “I don’t think the film is working like a trick,” she says. “I don’t think that I’m a prankster.”

I tell her that we can skip my planned follow-up question about how she used to be a fire dancer and magician in a travelling circus. “But it’s interesting, my background with the circus, because I don’t like how in the circus you tell people something is the truth when it’s not. With filmmaking, it’s the other way around. You’re digging to find the trueness behind things.”

In terms of digging, Schilinski and Peter spent three-and-a-half years writing the screenplay, often spending entire days discussing the themes. “For two years, we didn’t write a word,” says Schilinski. “It was just: how can we turn this into a film? When we created a plot and characters, everything I was interested in disappeared.” After visiting the abandoned farm itself, the duo took inspiration from photographs left lying around. Further research followed. “It wasn’t our intention to do a film about the female gaze. But then we found so many tiny, untold stories of violence that became overwhelming.”

She continues, “There’s no main character or three-act structure. It’s not plot-driven or character-driven. It’s a unique structure. We needed time to allow ourselves to write down all these images that came up during the writing process, almost in a hallucinatory way.” Is it hard to do a film about memory, when you don’t know how someone else sees things in their head? “Yes, but I never thought about the audience. We just tried to do the film that we felt interested in. So it became a weird film.”

Schilinski proudly states that she didn’t face any interference with the script. The only compromise was the title, which for years she intended to be The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue. Even then, Sound of Falling isn’t the most marketable name, while the German title, In die Sonne schauen, which translates to Looking into the Sun, refers to the screenplay’s cut opening: a POV shot of the sun in the sky, as if from behind closed eyelids. “I had a specific picture in my mind, and we tried to shoot it, with a pig’s ear in front of the sun, but it wasn’t the same.”

Schilinski, then, isn’t spoonfeeding answers to the viewer. I tell the director I will watch the film for a fifth time, now with a less analytical mind-set. “It’s good to watch it in a cinema, because you’re really entering a world,” she says. “The film is playful. It’s serious and not serious. Bresson said audiences should feel a film before trying to understand it. Viewers can think a film is a puzzle to solve. But it’s not about that with this film. It’s not about who’s related to who. It’s good to watch it like you’re entering a river and flowing with it.”

Sound of Falling is out in UK cinemas now.