The day before shooting commenced on Anatomy of a Fall, star Sandra Hüller posed the question to her director, Justine Triet, on which their entire film seemingly hinged: “Is she innocent or not?” Hüller had never stepped into the shoes of this kind of character, a grieving widow who may or may not also be the killer, but the veteran German actress was ready for the challenge. “The older I get, the more I know that it’s just a question of perspective sometimes,” she says. “When I was younger, I always made sure I was on the right side of the moral position—it doesn’t work anymore.” Still, old habits die hard. So when she pressed Triet for an answer, the filmmaker replied with what Hüller now calls the “famous sentence”: “I want you to play her like she’s innocent.”

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Hüller took that directive, “panicked” as it initially made her, and out of it emerged one of the year’s richest, deepest, and most complex screen performances. Her work also anchors a film that takes the ambiguity around a woman’s credibility and ingeniously spins it into a suspenseful drama of ambition, power, and interrogation. Triet and Hüller debuted Anatomy of a Fall at Cannes in May, a festival of heavy hitters; the film was so rapturously received that it hardly seemed surprising when it was awarded the coveted Palme d’Or. “My answer is a bit of a Teletubby answer, but that was really quite magical and joyful,” the French-born Triet says through an interpreter. “Cannes tends to be a pretty violent place, so to have such a unanimous response was great.”

Over Zoom for their first interview since that triumphant debut, Triet and Hüller share a connection that both of them individually highlight for me—not that they need to. It’s obvious in how they keenly listen to one another as they speak and build on each other’s insights. The film also serves as ample evidence. Anatomy of a Fall is a star vehicle, one that allows Hüller—a celebrated European star poised for a major international breakthrough this year, also given her lauded turn in fellow Cannes prize–winner The Zone of Interest—to unleash her command of craft. Yet her tour de force performance is also central to the vision of Triet, who sculpts a film of fascinating inquiry and towering intensity. It’s why both are about to embark on a robust awards campaign, propelled by US distributor Neon—Anatomy of a Fall will make stops at festivals in Telluride, Toronto, and New York, positioning itself as an across-the-board contender.

Hüller inspired Triet to write Anatomy before she even knew of its existence. They’d previously worked together on Triet’s relatively comic 2019 movie, Sibyl. “I knew that her character [in Anatomy] would have something kind of ungraspable,” Triet says. She even named the protagonist Sandra a year or so before sending the actor the script. Triet devised a cunning moral drama disguised as a legal one, incited by Sandra’s husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) falling out of their house’s window to his death. Was he pushed? Did he trip? Out in the remote snowy French mountains, Sandra and her sight-impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) find the body and call the police in agonizing shock, but as the mechanics of the tragedy are outlined, more questions arise than answers. “I really wanted to stay away from all of the narrative reflexes of a whodunit kind of film,” Triet says. “Where something is unknown and will remain unknown, we have to compose with what is there in the meantime.”

That “meantime” provides Anatomy’s dramatic crux, with Sandra eventually forced to plead her innocence in court, represented by her old friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud). We learn about Sandra and Samuel’s history through competing narratives, between prosecution and defense, and within the malleability of memory. Sandra’s notoriety as a published author comes up in the courtroom; so too do her relatively fluid sexual preferences. She does not apologize for who she is. Hüller situated herself in a context in which everything she said and did informed the narrative. “It’s very much a film about the audience and what their perspective is on a woman: on a successful woman, on a bisexual woman, on all these things—and how the thoughts on her change with every information they get,” she says. It’s why Triet took so much time in the courtroom, even as the film is not particularly interested in the conventions of courtroom drama. “This space was going to be where a kind of rewriting occurred,” the director says. “A scripting of this woman’s life and a diving into her mind.”

That scripting turns especially thorny for Sandra, who’s required to defend herself—explain herself, really—in French, a language she does not speak so proficiently. This went for Hüller as well—the German actor is fluent in English, but needed to learn the Anatomy’s native tongue alongside the character. (The film flits between French and English throughout, but features enough of the former to qualify for France’s international feature Oscar contender, should the country select it.) “There are so many layers in it, and the language layer is one of them,” Hüller says. “To be in the position where you constantly have to explain yourself—there is a risk that people get things wrong that you say.”

A blushing Hüller offers to leave the Zoom room when I ask Triet what drew her back to the actor—what about Hüller, previously best known for leading Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, so compelled her to develop such a demanding, slippery character study around her. I ask Hüller to stick around—“Americans love this stuff,” I reason—and she does quietly, with a slightly embarrassed smile. Off the cuff, then, Triet offers a rather striking tribute to the actor. She talks about the way she first saw Hüller walk onto a French set and integrate herself seamlessly. She talks about Hüller’s “incredible” preparation, and how when action is called, her interpretation “transcends the script.” She talks about their bond: “We have a really incredible connection—we’re the same age, and there’s almost a kind of kinship between us.” One senses she could go on forever.

Triet moves into English at one point to add another detail, almost apologetic at the length of her answer. “But Americans love it!” Hüller says, now laughing. Triet concurs with a smirk, and so she concludes with a rather profound observation: “Despite being a wonderful technician, that’s not what Sandra is playing on. She’s playing with her soul.”

The film cannily, sparely flashes back to Sandra and Samuel’s life before the latter’s demise, diagnosing what appears to be the deterioration of a marriage. One scene captures an explosive argument between them, played with a searing specificity by both Hüller and Theis; my mind immediately went back to it when Triet mentioned her star performing with soul. The two-hander is a miraculous act of performance that feels, somehow, both expertly modulated and utterly spontaneous. “Actors really 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,” Hüller says. “It takes a long time until somebody says, ‘Okay, this is enough, and now I’m going to scream at you.’”

That instinct speaks to the “trust” Hüller refers to in navigating a Triet set. For as much as Triet had to say about the actor, Hüller was no less effusive—in gratitude, it seemed—for the collaboration with the filmmaker. “All the things Justine describes about my work are only possible with someone like her, who is a true artist with a brain and talent I wish I had,” she says, “and compassion for everyone.” You feel that compassion in Anatomy of a Fall, a tough work whose sense of empathy remains expansive. This goes principally for Sandra, regardless of the truth of her ultimate act. Triet holds tight to Sandra’s belief in herself, in how she handled difficult moments, and how she stood up for her career and her independence. She owns her power. She doesn’t feel any guilt over that.

Triet points me to some of the big questions posed by Anatomy of a Fall: “How can we live together? How can we reinvent the codes and norms of being in a relationship? What do we owe to each other?” She spent years, all told, grappling with them as she made this movie, and crafted this character. “In the arc of their relationship, for me, it ends on a statement of, ‘I love you and I think you’re wrong,’” Triet says. “I believe in the continued effort to say that: ‘I love you and I think you’re wrong.’”

Anatomy of a Fall will make its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival this weekend, before Neon releases the film in theaters on October 13. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.