Anatomy of a Fall and the Power of the Unseen Past

“I had just used flashbacks extensively in previous works and I can tell you it's a nightmare to edit.” So says Justine Triet, co-writer and director of Anatomy of a Fall. She continues, noting flashbacks are part of the “clichés and tropes that we were trying to avoid.” This is more than a preference. It is a mission statement. By refusing to show us the moment Samuel falls, Triet and her writing partner Arthur Harari do something fundamental. They deny the audience the comfort of objective truth. The entire film becomes an exercise not in discovering what happened, but in watching characters construct competing, irreconcilable fictions around an absence. The choice to omit is the choice that creates the story.

This approach forces an active viewer. We are placed in the jury box, left to sift through the audio of a marital argument, the conflicting testimony of a child, and the speculative theories of lawyers. The film argues, as Triet herself suggested during a discussion at the New York Film Festival, that the courtroom is a place for fiction, not truth. Had they shown the fall in a cold open, the film would become a simple procedural about proving a known fact. By withholding it, they craft a drama about the terrifying ambiguity of memory and motive. It’s a lesson in narrative tension built not on what is shown, but on the potent gravity of what is not.

This power of omission resonates in other recent work. Consider Celine Song’s Past Lives. The film is steeped in history, yet it contains no flashbacks to Nora and Hae Sung’s childhood in Seoul. Their past is not a scene we watch; it is a weight they carry into every present-moment interaction. The drama is not in seeing them as children. The drama is in watching them, as adults, try to reconcile those children with who they have become. Song told Creative Screenwriting that the first Skype call was one of the hardest scenes to write, a testament to the difficulty of dramatizing the awkward, painful negotiation of a shared history across a digital divide. The story exists in the gap between then and now, a space the audience must fill with their own feelings about time and connection.

Adaptation is, by its nature, an act of omission. A writer must choose what to kill. For his Oscar-winning script for American Fiction, Cord Jefferson faced the task of translating Percival Everett’s dense, literary novel Erasure. His key decision was tonal. Jefferson told WrittenBy magazine that the story “had to be funny,” a choice that meant trimming some of the novel's darker, more academic passages. This was not a betrayal of the source. It was a clarification of purpose for a different medium. By consciously curating the tone and leaving certain elements on the page, Jefferson sharpened the satire and made its central argument accessible to a film audience. He found the movie inside the book by deciding what the movie was not.

Even the writing process itself is a battle against the extraneous. Boots Riley described his initial concept for a film about boosters finding a teleporter, an idea he abandoned because he “got bored.” That boredom is a critical tool. It’s the writer’s internal compass pointing away from the derivative and toward something more personal. His disciplined routine, detailed in a Complex interview, is about creating the conditions for that compass to work. A laptop with no WiFi, a protected block of time: these are not just habits. They are walls built to keep out the noise of the world so the writer can hear the story and, more important, hear what is not the story. It is a process of filtration, of omitting the distractions until only the essential remains.

The defining choice in Anatomy of a Fall is the empty space at its center. The film succeeds because it respects that void, refusing to fill it with a simple answer. It understands that a story's power often comes from the questions it leaves behind. The unseen, the unsaid, the deliberately omitted: this is where interpretation begins. This is where the audience is invited to become a collaborator. The final shot is not an answer. It is a quiet moment of exhaustion and ambiguity. The most important question a writer can ask is not “What should I add?” It is “What can this story afford to lose?” What truth are you brave enough to withhold?