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• Sensibility: This film explores some crazy realities of relationships, parenthood, love, and death but does so with great care for realism that there isn't a moment where anything feels out of place.
• Cinematography: The film is brilliant visually because it conveys a huge portion of the story with only the camera. There are shots of Sandra that add masterfully to the ambiguous nature of the story. The production design is brilliant and the structure of the house and surrounding areas is a critical part of the story. Costuming is simple and effective and editing is flawless. Sound design and score are two underrated elements of the film that play a huge role narratively, particularly in the piano playing and audio recordings, and do an incredible job of modulating the tone of the film.
• Energy: The story is so packed with relentless events that, combined with brilliant soundtrack and score and jaw-dropping, nuanced performances from the whole cast, create a story that keeps you not only at the edge of your seat but might just take you all the way off the chair.
• Narrative: A perfect story, and I'm not saying that lightly. It's a brilliant combination of cultural clash, love, death, family, children, guilt, innocence, truth, and lies. The dialogue choices are logically sound; meaningful; culturally appropriate, even with the clash of English, French, and German; and convey the depth of the characters while communicating a story that proceeds on its own. The ambiguity of guilt and of the testimonies create a layer of intrigue in the film that makes it infinitely rewatchable. The structure of Sandra's character and her German heritage create the perfect confluence of circumstances to make the process of the trial gripping but also gives her deception and behaviors sensibility.
• T-Points: The film received five bonus points: one for a shot of Sandra off in an attic corner as a lawyer inspects a window and for a scene where she's reviewing her life with some lawyers on camera and identifies that she will "have to admit things," one for a sequence of Daniel's imaginations of the different scenarios beings described during the trial, one for a brutal recorded argument scene and the proceeding trial, one for a scene where Sandra's son kicks her out of the house, one for Daniel's experiment on the dog and for Daniel's testimony about a trip with his Dad to the vet.

I am always very hesitant to give a film a perfect score, so much so that I will often reflect for days on potential flaws even to a possibly pedantic, sedulous level. Even after days of searching, I seriously believe this movie is without flaw. It is the perfect combination of character study; emotional, thought provoking material; and cinematic brilliance all wrapped in a snappy, sensible package. I think I could even give this film more than a perfect score; there is so much in the film that I believe is bonus worthy that I couldn't even address it all. The son's sacrificial testimony to save his mother's life made me weep more than I have watching a movie in a long while. The unbelieveable performances that Sandra Hüller and Milo Machado-Graner put on as well as throughout the whole film are nuanced, emotional, flawless, and significant in a way that will keep me coming back to this film year after year.

Number of Watches: 2