Runner-up: Observer/Anthony Burgess prize 2024

A runner-up in our annual arts writing prize, Alice Hughes reviews Justine Triet’s acclaimed 2023 thriller, in which even the dog is a class act

Read the winning entry for the 2024 Observer/Burgess prize

Alice Hughes studied music and French literature at the universities of Cardiff and Oxford and writes about film, books and TV. She works in politics and lives in Cardiff

“You are not a victim.” Sandra Hüller needs only these five words to execute one of the best line deliveries of any actor in any film of the past year, such is her mesmeric screen presence in the Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall. Hüller plays Sandra Voyter, a successful author living in the French Alps with her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). After he is found dead in the snow having seemingly fallen from an attic window – their visually impaired 11-year-old son, Daniel (a magnificent Milo Machado-Graner), the only witness – Sandra is put on trial for his murder. The scene in which this line occurs is the film’s boiling point – a flashback to a vicious argument the couple had the day before the death that at first glance adds weight to the prosecution’s assertion that she is guilty. Or is she? Like most of the evidence, it is circumstantial.