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Dir. Michael Haneke

Rating: 7.7  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

An enormous number of things go on behind closed doors in Austrian director Michael Haneke's latest piece of cinematic disturbia, a point the filmmaker stresses time and time again by literally keeping the doors shut and the audience out. As gifted an artist as Haneke is -- and his talent is undeniable -- one can not often refer to his films as "pleasurable," exactly. He's too busy picking the delicate locks to the trapdoors of our psyches to give his audience much in the way of comfort. In films such as Cache and Funny Games, he stresses the viewer out nearly as much as the suffering characters he depicts. Here, he's found a nearly perfect conduit of his prevailing themes of cruelty, repression and those things we choose to hide from ourselves.

The time is the year just before the first World War in a small village in northern Germany. A quaint place with rolling farmland, peasants and nobles, and a curious outcropping of unexplained accidents and disasters. As told to us by the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), the story begins when the town doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown off his horse and badly injured. Subsequent investigations reveal a thin trip wire had been put up directly in his path. No culprits are identified, and soon more mishaps are reported, from the seemingly accidental death of a field worker to the explicit beatings and tortures of some of the local schoolchildren, including the son of the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur), who ramps up the pressure on the townsfolk to police themselves.

Eventually, the film hints at the truth of who might be behind these attacks, but that ultimately is far from the point: Being a Haneke film, resolution, as such, is not in the offing. Instead of pointing fingers, Haneke indicts the entire structure of the town's society -- especially amongst the adults and town leaders -- finding creeping menace in every scrubbed child's face, and swaying tree branch. But unlike, say, David Lynch, Haneke isn't going for campy arthouse eeriness, he doesn't stop until the outbreak of the first great war, perhaps the inevitable eruption of a society repressed to the breaking point.

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