The film stars German actress Sandra Hüller, famed for her performance in the 2016 Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann and who had a supporting role in Triet’s 2019’s drama Sibyl,

She plays Sandra Voyter, a successful German novelist put on trial in France for the murder of her French, much-less-successful writer husband Samuel (Samuel Theis). The only witness to the death was the couple’s 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is blind.

Neon picked up the North American rights for the film after the rapturous response of its Cannes premiere.

Did you create the role with Sandra Hüller in mind?

Yes. I met Sandra 10 years ago, when she gave me an award at a festival. And, of course, like almost everyone, I saw Toni Erdmann. I was so impressed by that film and by her as an actress. I love the director (Maren Ade) and found it very inspiring. So, I sort of had her in my mind. That’s why I gave her the role in Sibyl. It was a small role for her, but I immediately connected to the relationship that she has to her acting. She has a very artistic approach, and her journey is very different from what you can see in France. She started with theater, and she has this very deep commitment, even physically, to what she does. It was during the making of Sibyl that I had this idea of creating a role for her.

The first idea was to write it in English. I finally came up with this story about a German writer living in France because I decided that this question of the language would not just be something we should try to get rid of because you want to work with a foreign actress, but that language should be at the core of this foreign character who is being tried in a foreign country and can’t defend herself in her mother tongue. Language becomes a key aspect of the plot.

I read these true-crime stories and watch these trial movies and series on an almost daily basis. So they were an inspiration. I’d always thought that one day I’d do a film with a trial at the heart of the plot. But often, the impression that I got as a viewer of these shows and films, or when I would read or watch them, is that the stories are too easy, too obvious. The resolution is always too obvious. I don’t want to give any spoilers for the film, but the resolution here is not obvious. My intention in making this film is to have something quite complex and, even by the end of the film, unclear. Together with my co-writer [Arthur Harari] we really worked on that aspect, to constantly create questions around the case and around the trial. You can see it as a whodunit, but I think it’s mainly a film about a couple’s relationship. What was interesting for me was to use this pretext of the murder trial to dissect the relationship of a couple who have a child together but do not have a common language. For me that was the center of the story, the trial was a side story.

Reality vs. fiction–turning facts of the real world into narrative stories

One of the plot’s elements involves an audio recording of a fight the couple have. The recording becomes very important in the trial. Now a recording like that is supposed to be a form of absolute proof, of clear facts. But even this sound recording is used by the prosecutor out of context. It becomes just material to fictionalize, and then attack, Sandra. Everybody is completely separated from the truth of what actually happened and is creating different fictions around her.

It was quite a challenge because the fight took us two days to shoot. And, from the beginning, writing the script with my co-writer, we didn’t agree on this fight. Writing this fight scene was actually a fight between the two of us about what it meant. For the shoot, Sandra wanted to do the entire scene in one day, she didn’t want to stop or break it up. But it was extremely grueling. It was a really hard process to get through. So we shot the first day. And then on the second day, I was watching them and I realized that even we we had all the material we needed, visually, the two couldn’t stop acting, playing out the full scene. So we kept recording and we had this full fight, maybe 12-14 minutes long, with its very violent ending, all recorded. It was really interesting for me because I’ve always been really fascinated by sound. I’ve more obsessed with recording sound than images. Because you cannot cheat with sound the way you can with images. The truth is in there. That’s something that you see in crime stories and trials, that audiences are fascinated by, by sound, they sense this degree of authenticity in it. But there’s another aspect which is this kind of emotional power, this melancholy, that you feel in sound that you can never create with images. One of the first decisions in the film, even during the writing process, was that we would take away some of the images, and have to cling to the sound, which would give us the material to seek the truth of the story, without images to show it.

It was obvious to me from the start that Snoop would be the double of the husband. He’s not just another character or some animal running around. In many ways, he represents this dead person. There was a scene we shot that we ended up editing out of the final film, where the dog vomits and it was clear that he was the presence that has replaced Samuel. I’ve worked with animals before: I have a monkey and a dog in my previous films, and I know it’s often not easy to work with animals. But we had good luck this time to work with someone who trains animals for the industry. The lady who owns Snoop was key person for us to allow him to be a character, really as much a part of the film’s ensemble as any of the other actors.

He is as much a character as any other. In several scenes, we are on the level of the dog, we see things from his perspective.