Really? Talk about ghosts? What kind of ghosts? There are no ghosts!
Of course there are no ghosts. I use the term metaphorically, to talk about intrusions into our consciousness, or the realms close to it, like dreams, or inklings, or vague memories. But there are also representations of ghosts used by artists to get a point across that would be hard to convey otherwise.
This brings me to three films that I watched across the last weeks, with nods to ghosts as an artistic tool in two of them, and my own private “ghosts” being triggered by the third.
The latter, The Perfect Lie, is psychodrama disguised as a murder mystery. Good entertainment, if you go for that sort of stuff (as I do.) The other two, My Sad Dead and The Sound of Falling (In die Sonne schauen) are something altogether different. Both are immeasurably cruel and gory in images and message, and will linger in your head for months to come. The best – and paradoxically most beautiful – cinematography I have seen in a long time. Heartbreaking, as a package.
Why am I writing these reviews? I guess to consolidate my thoughts and get them out of my system. My prediction is that most of my readers will not want to expose themselves to fare that is violent and painful. But for the few who might, you will be amply rewarded. There is something about being in the presence of true art and hard questions that cannot be found anywhere else, and might change how you think about things.
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The Perfect Lie is one of those typical slick Netflix productions that showcase the filthy rich having the same problems as us average mortals. (“See, the rich suffer too, no need to be envious of them…”)
Sex, drugs, partying and consumerism cannot hide the rot underneath, which eventually leads to the fiery death of one partner and the attempted murder of another in a tight group of four couples. The WHODUNNIT ensues, with each episode being told from the point of view of the remaining participants. No spoiler alert on my part – it is unclear how it ends for at least one of the victims, since Season 2 is waiting in the wings….
Why did I watch glitzy fare like that? It was filmed in a small village at the Dutch North Sea, a place where I spent my childhood summers. At that time it was still a sleepy artist colony, just opening up to tourism. Wide, sandy beaches, dunes and conifer forests that were protected as National Park, endless opportunity to be outside, play with other kids without curfew and eat lots of french fries and ice cream. Bliss, on the surface of it.
Friderike Heuer Mirage (2017) (Series: The Refugees’ Dreams) Dune Villa photographed in Bergen aan Zee, the site of the film.
I have been back there a few times as an adult, the last time almost a decade ago. It was just for short visits with family, centered on strolling the lanes, walking on the beach, the occasional short hike through the dunes. The film captures wide swaths of the landscape with a lot of drone footage, including landmark buildings that stand as strong as they did in 1959. The distinct (often stark) nature of the area is poignantly depicted.
Did those images ever trigger the ghosts in the machine. So many emotions flooded to the surface, crowding out any rational reactions in my mind. These summers were the first time when I sensed that something was wrong, observed adults being crippled and fragile, not just strong, protective parents. Could not put any name to it yet – the notion of the damage WW II had induced, including perpetual PTSD, came along much later in my young adult years. The core message of the film, that constant adult lying or subterfuge provokes unease and confusion (and eventually catastrophe), perfectly mirrored the state of this 7-year-old trying to make sense of a world that was volatile.
For anyone else watching this series as just another glimpse into European regions and lifestyles, it might be a perfectly entertaining romp.
Friderike Heuer Ghosts (2017) (Series: The Refugees’ Dreams) Landscape photographed in Bergen aan Zee, the site of the film.
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Spoiler Alerts
“Real” ghosts populate the screen in My Sad Dead, another Netflix production of a very different kind. Directed by Pablo Larrain and filmed by Sergio Armstrong, it is closer to an arthouse movie with social criticism at its core and political analysis on the side lines. If that sounds like an intellectual construct – it is not. It is an emotional, empathetic art work that captures some essential parts of what it means to be human in our own times. Based on a selection of short stories by Mariana Enriquez, the series introduces a 60-year-old doctor living in Buenos Aires, who has been able to see and talk to the dead since she was a child. The viewer also sees these ghosts behind slightly obfuscating veils. They are not happy or complacent, but relive the painful moments of their deaths, exposing the doctor (and us) to their constant agony.
Friderike Heuer What’s Left Behind (2017) (Series: The Refugees’ Dreams)
Bit by bit, we learn that Ema lost her hospital job after having engaged in triage of patients during Covid, letting some die to help others with better survival chances to get access to the oxygen tanks. We realize that her fraught relationship with her daughter who seems as lonely and isolated as the mother, has partially to do with the daughter’s participation in a lethal overdose of her boyfriend. And we meet her estranged sister who visits from far away Oregon with her family. She is bringing her daughter for medical treatment, available for free in Argentina. The young woman is morbidly obese and deemed mentally ill because she, too, sees ghosts, and has a circle of close friends among them, with all continuously engaging in noisy group sex. (Yes, we see that too, if we can bring ourselves to watch, confronting our own body image prejudices.)
Ema intermittently lives in the house of her mother who recently died, in a suburban neighborhood surrounded by projects that teem with poverty and crime, leading the middle-class neighbors to embrace ever more fascistic means to defend themselves. (Historical references to Argentina’s past and presently rising fascism, including neighborhood brownshirts, abound.) Ema’s niece escapes her psychiatric confinement and chooses to end her life in a water tower that supplies the entire neighborhood. Her mother abandons her, even in death, pretending she is still alive, insisting that she cannot handle abnormality, or deviation from body norms, literally striking her very memory from her life and fleeing the country.
Soon everyone can hear the cries of the dead after having consumed the water, and the doctor is constantly called to quiet them down and send them away. The eager demand of her extraordinary skill turns into a witch hunt when it becomes clear that it was her niece who contaminated the water. The menacing mood is amplified by spectacular cinematography that focusses on the hostile architecture of the projects and industrial sites in muddled grey and browns. But it also circles back over and over to the clear, determined, unflappable face of the doctor, who just dons her bright blue scarf and brings peace to the ghosts as well as her neighbors.
Friderike Heuer Border Crossings (2017) (Series: The Refugees’ Dreams)
In the end she and her daughter sit with the now happy ghosts of her niece and her mother contentedly around the dinner table, having an ordinary meal. Almost like a reminder that if you acknowledge the suffering brought on by horrible societal forces and don’t avert your gaze, courageously engage in some form of remediation, you will not be haunted by instantiated memories.
No didacticism detected. Just a subtle underlying narrative that reminds us of the possibility (and the rewards) of being an ethical human being, even under oppressive circumstances, forced gender roles and class divisions.
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The Sound of Falling (In die Sonne schauen) is a German film directed by Mascha Schilinski with Fabian Gamper behind the camera. It won the Jury Prize in Cannes in 2025, the year of its release, and was nominated for multiple categories at the Oscars. I have now watched it multiple times and am still uncertain how the filmmakers pulled it off: they tell a coherent story with the use of mosaic-like snippets, both visually and thematically, that follow no straight time line. The film involve endless characters that contribute to the narrative unfolding in ways that are almost undetectable at first viewing, many of them children filmed in a way that we see the world – literally – from their eye level.
Set on an old farmstead in the East of Germany (in the state that just voted for right-wing extremist AfD), the film follows the fate of four girls and their families across a century, starting in the years before WW I, and ending in our own time. Even though there are no actual ghosts depicted, the framing and jumps across time in the same location – the kitchen, the house, the hayloft, the river that eventually divides East from West Germany – leads to a sense that the remnants of previous lives and deaths are contained in the material world. The walls, the hallways, the underwater current in the river all affect subsequent generations, united by the only escape open to them from suffocating and violent fates – a willing encounter with death.
Although the theme as it unfolds has to do with how women are subjugated, sexually abused, shamed and silenced, the film starts with a reminder that men were not exempt from harm – the oldest son of the farm is mutilated by his parents to escape being drafted for WW I. A small boy is unceremoniously lying in state in a barn with other children playing around him without inhibition – death being part of their lives. We meet little Alma who discovers a photograph of her look-alike sister, also named Alma and long gone. She worries she will be next, but it is one of her older sisters who takes her own life by jumping off a rolling hay wagon. She was “traded”as a farm girl to a neighboring farmer who had sustained her family after a bad harvest. These farm girls were forcibly sterilized – historical fact – so that they could be sexually used by any of the male farmhands without getting pregnant, which would have interrupted their ability to provide hard labor. Alma’s sister cannot live, literally, facing that fate.
Also historical fact was that many women of the next generation, now in the 1940s shortly before the end of WW II, went in groups into the rivers. Laden with stones, they drowned themselves, to avoid being raped by the incoming Russian army. Erika is among them. Her sister survived, never to be mentally intact again or able to protect her own daughter, Angelika. A teenager in the 1980s, she is sexually abused by her uncle and harassed by her cousin. We last see her like a ghost on a family photograph before she left the farm – it remains unclear if she swam through the mined river towards freedom (there was prior information that she was a very strong swimmer) or if she, too, drowned herself. She is never heard from again.
The last views of farm and river come through the eyes of a young teen, Lenka, who grapples with growing up under the leering eye of adult males. Her parents and a younger sister all moved out from Berlin to renovate the now empty farm, with the mother destroying precious tiled ovens with a pickax and a degree of fury that you wonder what she will do next. Lenka’s younger sister Nelly is plagued by nightmares and anxiety, and eventually climbs the height of the hay barn to tumble to her death, ambiguously shown in ways that could be either intentional or accidental.
Friderike Heuer Shelter (2017) (Series: The Refugees’ Dreams)
The German title of the film is Looking into the sun. What happens when you look into the sun? You are blinded. Are we the ones blinded? Blinded to cruel undercurrents when the imagery we see is incredible beautiful? Willingly ignorant of the fact that nothing much has changed across a century when it comes to the victimization of women? Blind to the reality that life was cruel, when we are yearning for the so-called good old times? Grateful for blinders that protect us from the eerie possibility that place contains traces of memory independent of rememberers (a question the filmmakers asked themselves)? The film successfully rips those blinders off, exposing us to what we so very much don’t want to see.
The English title, The Sound of Falling, elicits some speculation as well. There is very little sound in the film, other than music. Few lines are spoken, some of them in a language (a version of low German) that practically no longer exists, and so is incomprehensible. And you don’t hear the impact of the various falls, much less any sound in the process of the falling. Have we closed our ears, as well as our eyes, to suffering? These are sounds that cannot be imagined, un-real – just like ghosts. What haunts us here, though, is not ghosts but an inescapable co-experiencing of people’s lives, people who had no real means of escape.
Haunting, indeed.