I binge-watched so many movies over the holidays and by far, one of my favorites was Anatomy of a Fall. It seems, at first, like such a simple premise: a woman stands trial, accused of murdering her husband by defenestration. But it’s a brilliant film for what we see and what we don’t see, for how the story unfolds, and for Sandra Hüller’s singular performance as the new widow accused of murder. Hüller has a second Oscar-bait film, The Zone of Interest, out right now but I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s been getting rave reviews for months. Anatomy, Zone and Hüller have all been picking up some critics awards and it feels like Hüller might actually be a contender.

So who is Sandra Hüller? She’s a 45-year-old German actress who has worked in Germany and France for much of her career, rarely even taking any kind of English-language roles. She’s now considered one of Germany’s top actresses, like Germany’s Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett. About a month ago, Hüller spoke to Vanity Fair about Anatomy and finally “breaking through” to the American market:

Why audiences respond to Anatomy of a Fall: “It’s very much a film about the audience and what their perspective is on a successful woman, on a bisexual woman, on all these things and how the thoughts on her change with every information they get.” The actor herself felt that push and pull, asking [director Justine] Triet early on whether Sandra was guilty. Triet had no answer but asked that Hüller play her as innocent.

Hüller played her character as murky and secretive: “Actors like to do really big things sometimes, and they love emotions, and they want to show it—but in my experience, and maybe I’m the only one, normally people try to avoid that in their lives because it’s really painful. It takes a long time until somebody says, ‘Okay, this is enough, and now I’m going to scream at you.’”

Growing up in the small German town of Friedrichroda. “There was always a lot going on inside, and I didn’t really have a place to put it,” she says. It wasn’t just the ability to step into different roles, when she joined a drama club as a teenager, that felt so freeing. “I loved the way that we were talking to each other, the awareness that everybody had for each other, the kindness—the discussions we had about certain topics that I didn’t find anywhere else in my surroundings. It wasn’t common in my small town to speak about the things that were important to me, let’s put it that way.”

She doesn’t push herself to do roles that feel alien to her. “These are words that I really don’t have in my purse—I don’t use ambition, and I don’t use push—because they are really unfamiliar to me. I have colleagues that say that’s a lie: ‘You’re just lying. Everybody has it.’”

[From Vanity Fair]

Am I using this post to hype Hüller? For sure, I think she’s a big contender for an Oscar. But I also want to talk about Anatomy of a Fall – I want the discourse, because it was SO good and I still don’t know exactly what happened once the son left the house. SPOILERS!! The prosecutor was so evil and sexist, but he also failed to ask one of my first questions: if Sandra was listening to something with her earphones to drown out the sound of the “P.I.M.P” instrumental, how did she hear her son’s cries when he found the body? The other side of that is… if she killed her husband, I don’t think she would have wanted her son to discover the body. That being said, her husband was a complete douchebag and I would have been fine with it if she killed him! Sorry not sorry.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.