This French drama follows Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a German writer living in Grenoble. One day her husband (Samuel Theis) falls from a window to his death, and before you can saw widow pain, Sandra is accused of his murder.

True to its title, Anatomy of a Fall delivers a forensic, almost glacial exploration of the case, which slaloms between revelations like a courtroom version of the Iranian film A Separation. Let’s call it The Trial Separation. Though overlong at 2.5 hours, the movie’s ice-cold realism holds your attention, grounded by Hüller’s pitch-perfect performance as the woman whose gender and sexuality are essentially put on trial.

The picture recalls recent psychological dramas like Luce and Tar, whose knotty plots equally twist the cultural conversation – although Anatomy of a Fall is never as stimulating or ambiguous as its whiplash-inducing contemporaries. But the film has more on its mind than the facts of the case, and subverts the “he said, she said” format by making one of the parties a corpse. He’s dead, she said.

The result is interesting because we are never really expected to think Sandra guilty, more an exhumation of a marriage than an examination of a crime scene. Sandra’s lawyer (Swann Arlaud) even tells us that the facts don’t matter, only the interpretation of events. Despite its nods to The Shining, the movie’s roots are in Rashomon and its cinematic probing of perception. Director Justine Triet explores these ideas from the perspective of Sandra’s partially blind son (Milo Machado-Graner), presenting the bickering adults around him as disembodied voices.

With its purely diegetic sound and slowly escalating story, this is a worthy winner of both the Palme d’Or and Palm Dog (shout out Messi the border collie). You may not be on the edge of your seat, but Anatomy of a Fall provides plenty to chew on.