• Courtesy Of Neon
• A man's fatal fall puts his wife on trial and their son in the hot seat in a long but riveting French courtroom drama

Sure, you know about the Palme d'Or, the top award at the Cannes Film Festival. But have you heard of the Palm Dog, a Cannes tradition that honors the best canine performance? This year, the winner of the latter award was a terrifyingly well-trained border collie named Messi, who played the pivotal role of "Snoop" in the French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall. The film also won the Palme d'Or. You can see Messi's star turn — with his human costars, of course — at Merrill's Roxy Cinemas.

The deal

Snoop is a very good boy who lives in a chalet in the French Alps with his wonderful family — renowned German novelist Sandra (Sandra Hüller), teacher Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their 10-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is partially blind and takes loving care of Snoop.

But on this particular day, things are not wonderful. Samuel won't stop playing a steel-drum instrumental cover of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." at earsplitting volume, disrupting Sandra's interview with a scholar. To escape the noise, Daniel takes Snoop on a walk — walk! — but when they return, things are even worse. Samuel is lying very still in the snow with blood around him, and he never gets up.

From then on, the house is full of strangers. Sandra's lawyer friend (Swann Arlaud) thinks Samuel jumped out the window. Other people accuse Sandra of doing something bad to her husband. They even drag Daniel into court to testify about what he heard that day. It's a dog's worst nightmare.

Will you like it?

No, Anatomy of a Fall doesn't actually unfold from the perspective of Snoop. Its viewpoint is close to the characters yet ruthlessly neutral; some scenes, especially those in the courtroom, are shot as if by a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. But this claustrophobia-inducing drama from director-cowriter Justine Triet will make viewers think hard about their own points of view — and perhaps argue about them once they leave the theater.

Did Sandra shove her husband over their balcony, or did he die by suicide — or perhaps even by accident? The material evidence is inconclusive, with dueling blood-spatter analysts presenting different versions of events. So the trial becomes a dissection of the couple's marriage, with an argument on the eve of Samuel's death — secretly taped by him — as the prime exhibit.

Triet makes us wait and wait to hear that tape — the film is two and a half hours long — but when we finally do, it does not disappoint. What started as a restrained drama about grief among Europe's intellectual class evolves over its run time into a riveting puzzler about the stories we tell ourselves — stories that aren't always the truth.

The film opens with Sandra's interview, putting her career as a novelist front and center. Coaxed to reveal how her books reflect her life, Sandra dodges the question by asking the interviewer (Camille Rutherford) questions about her life. At this point, Samuel (who's upstairs) drowns the conversation in "P.I.M.P."

The prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) will later claim that Sandra was flirting with the interviewer — one of many wounds she dealt to her husband's fragile ego before killing him. Over and over in the courtroom, she's depicted as a castrator, a cheater, a virulent narcissist who put her career before her family.

Even when you strip away the misogyny, there's a grain of truth to those accusations. But we saw the interview, and we know that Sandra was less interested in romancing the interviewer than she was in derailing the interviewer's efforts to construct a story about Sandra. This is one writer who insists on controlling the narrative, on or off the page.

Hüller (Toni Erdmann) is a virtuoso at conveying a strong personality through a self-contained shell. We don't know whether Sandra killed Samuel. We can't say how real her grief is. When she emphasizes her language barrier in the courtroom, forcing everyone to speak English, is it a power play or is she just too distraught to remember her French grammar? All we know for sure is that there's no way in hell she'll let prosecutors and the press have the last word.

The only person who might be up to challenging Sandra's story is another budding tale spinner — her son. Machado Graner gives a performance so natural it's heartbreaking and so ambiguous it's mesmerizing.

Anatomy of a Fall raises vexing questions about family loyalty, male-female relationships, creative ambition and, not least, the French legal system — which appears to admit all sorts of wild speculation. Sandra sums it up best when she tells the court, "A couple is a chaos." Where chaos reigns, only the stories we tell ourselves can make sense of it — until they don't.

If you like this, try...

Saint Omer (2022; Hulu, Kanopy, rentable): If Anatomy of a Fall whetted your appetite for emotionally wrenching dramas about the French legal system, try Alice Diop's film about the trial of a young mother accused of killing her infant.

Force Majeure (2014; Kanopy, Showtime, rentable): Anatomy of a Fall is ruthless in its depiction of the cracks that can open in a marriage. So is Ruben Östlund's dark comedy about one Swedish family's reaction to a brush with death on a ski vacation.

The Lost Daughter (2021; Netflix): Triet isn't the only female director to explore the once-taboo topic of women who don't always put their families first. Olivia Colman plays a vacationing professor reflecting on her life choices in Maggie Gyllenhaal's adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel.