The first shot of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” is an ominous portent of what’s to come, in miniature.

A ball bounces down the stairs and hits the floor, chased by a dog named Snoop. Its trajectory mimics the fall after which the film is titled, in which Samuel (Samuel Theis), plummets to his death from the top window of his chalet outside Grenoble, France. His body is discovered by his son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), with trusty Snoop in tow, in the dramatic opening of Triet’s magnum opus, in which a marriage itself is put on trial in a tightly wound courtroom drama.

Directed by Triet and co-written with her partner, Arthur Harari, “Anatomy of a Fall” calls to mind last year’s French Oscar entry, “Saint Omer,” directed by Alice Diop, in which a young immigrant woman is put on trial for the death of her baby. Here, the foreign-born woman is tried for the death of her husband, but the questions remain the same: Was it an accident or a willful killing? What unfolds is less a dissection of the details surrounding the circumstances of the case, but rather an inspection of womanhood itself, in which the ways a woman has failed to meet social or cultural expectations becomes a point of legal contention.

Sandra Hüller plays the wife and mother in “Anatomy of a Fall,” the preternaturally self-possessed novelist Sandra. When we meet her, she’s enjoying an afternoon glass of wine while trying to sit for an interview with a young academic. Their conversation is disturbed by an ear- splitting steel pan rendition of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that Samuel plays on repeat while he works on home renovations. The song will later echo absurdly throughout the immediate aftermath of his death and its subsequent investigation.

The autopsy comes back inconclusive, and so Sandra is put on trial for the murder of her husband. In Triet’s two-and-a-half hour epic, in which there’s not a single wasted scene, glance or camera movement, the filmmaker methodically unpacks the process of prosecuting Sandra and Samuel’s marriage, which was crumbling under past traumas, professional jealousy and years of resentment.

Triet plays with perspective and pressure over the course of “Anatomy of a Fall,” as the courtroom starts to feel like a slowly boiling cauldron, the fire stoked by an aggressive young prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), who calls to the stand a line of witnesses to spill the gory intimate details of their relationship.

A central moment is the playing of a voice memo capturing a fight between Samuel and Sandra, which Samuel secretly recorded. Triet takes us back in time to that moment, then yanks us back to the courtroom as the rest of the tape plays out, Sandra watching her son Daniel listen to his parents’ ugliest conflict.

Despite the opinionated bystanders and courtroom theatrics, Daniel was the only other witness to this marriage, despite being visually impaired, almost blind, from an early childhood accident that damaged his optic nerve (Snoop is his guide dog). Daniel wasn’t there for his father’s fall, and he can’t see much, but he feels deeply, and badly needs to understand the monumental loss of his father, before he can process the potential loss of his mother.

Triet and Harari’s script comes to focus on the vulnerable Daniel and his need to achieve emotional truth when the facts themselves won’t provide an inalienable truth.

“Anatomy of a Fall” isn’t about the facts and physics at all, but rather the intuitive, emotional truths that allow us to maintain a sense of stability.

In French and English, with English subtitles

MPA rating: R (for some language, sexual references and violent images)

Running time: 2:30

How to watch: In theaters