How Anatomy of a Fall drove a debatable mystery all the way to the Oscars

polygon.com:

These days, a “water cooler” conversation can flare up and burn out in days. It’s rare to see any movie or TV show still spark any kind of unifying online discussion more than a week after its debut on a new platform, or after the final episode airs. For every Barbie or Oppenheimer or Barbenheimer, where critics, fans, reactors, streamers, podcasters, and others keep talking about the project for months after its debut, there are dozens of Netflix shows where the conversation stops after release weekend, or would-be blockbusters that make some money at the box office, but that viewers seem to have forgotten before the final credit rolls.

One of the more surprising recent movies to beat the too-much-competition-for-attention curse (or is it the short-attention-span curse?) was Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, a two-and-a-half-hour French drama about the fallout of a troubled relationship that ends with a literal fall. Anatomy of a Fall wasn’t a Barbie-sized box office blowout, or the kind of short-term cultural fad that sparks Saturday Night Live sketches or endless online memes. After its French debut in August 2023, it opened in just five theaters in America, and at its largest nationwide expansion, it was still in fewer than 600 theaters. Oscar season may change that, but up until now, Triet’s latest has been firmly on the arthouse circuit.

And yet Anatomy of a Fall wound up lingering in those theaters for more than three months, as word of mouth spread and a steady trickle of people saw it and recommended it to their friends, followers, or audiences. It was endlessly discussed and picked apart, with different theories about the movie’s central mysteries. And it wound up on hundreds of critics’ top 10 lists for 2023 and won dozens of minor industry awards, along with the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it first premiered.

Why has the film lingered so long and had such an impact in an environment where filmgoers keep complaining about