12. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Probability (1994)
An early, and comparatively minor, Haneke exhibiting 71 “fragments” – or glimpses of apparently unrelated scenes and other people – set in present-day Vienna. These contain a safety guard, a troubled younger man, a depressed retiree and a Romanian unlawful immigrant. So what’s tying all of them collectively? The reply is partially given at first and totally on the finish, and the film offers us Haneke’s keynote themes: the character of violence, city alienation, the abolition of compassion and neighborhood in capitalism and western hypocrisy in primly wanting away from injustice and desolation in different components of the world. However the backstory twist ending – just like the one Krzysztof Kieślowski in impact gave us the identical yr in Three Colors Crimson – is a bit pat.
11. Humorous Video games US (2007)
Right here is the Americanised replica-remake that Haneke directed himself, a digital shot-for-shot revival of one in all his most sensational and controversial motion pictures. The unique from 1997 had a blandly affluent couple and younger son arriving at their good-looking lakeside trip dwelling in Austria and being terrorised by two satanic younger males. The remake transplants the motion to Lengthy Island, with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts because the couple and Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as their tormentors. The remake very effectively reproduces the steely, ice-cold horror of the unique. However why duplicate it?
10. Completely happy Finish (2017)
A satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois prosperity, which begins with a video surveillance scene (that key Haneke trope), the display in mobile-phone-style portrait mode. The scene is an impressive household property in Calais, presided over by a lady performed by Isabelle Huppert, a key performer and almost-muse for Haneke, sensible at incarnating glacial hauteur and hid ache. The household’s wealth is derived from a building and transport enterprise that cuts corners on security, and the prolonged clan gathers in all its dysfunction, a forged together with Toby Jones and Franz Rogowski. There are intriguing notes of black comedy on this movie, together with the standard themes of affluent denial and the return of the repressed.
9. Time of the Wolf (2003)
It could hardly be any shock that Haneke as soon as made a dystopian post-apocalyptic drama, or that it’s as brutal as the rest within the canon, together with The Street and The Final of Us. After an unexplained catastrophe has destroyed Europe, a lady performed by Huppert arrives together with her household at their nation dwelling the place strangers assault them – an unflinchingly stunning and upsetting scene – and he or she and the survivors trudge away to the practice station, the place assist could also be forthcoming. The title is taken from a Norse delusion of prehistory, and may have an echo of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf. There’s a sense of apocalypse in each Haneke movie, in fact: the movie’s certainty that that is what’s coming for all of us could be very unnerving.
8. Benny’s Video (1992)
This was the early film that freaked out unsuspecting European movie competition audiences and made Haneke a reputation to conjure with. It additionally revealed Haneke’s fascination with video and the way it made potential a brand new and coldly tactless scrutiny of our lives, an implacable recording angel of the whole lot we choose to overlook. A disturbed boy referred to as Benny, obsessive about violent pictures on video, murders a woman and information the act. His respectable dad and mom contrive to cowl up the crime, however the video isn’t amenable to this sort of hypocrisy.
7. The Seventh Continent (1989)
Haneke’s debut characteristic, meant initially for tv, is a surprising, upsetting, faintly hallucinatory drama exhibiting a affluent middle-class Austrian household realising how empty their lives are and planning to destroy themselves. The preliminary sequences are composed totally of closeups on bodily components: arms, ft, necks, waists, as they go about their day by day life. As soon as we see their faces as properly, there are disturbing hints that issues will not be as they must be. There is no such thing as a full, clear psychological clarification for the home apocalypse: only a nihilist horror that gemütlich household life can conceal a profound alienation and despair.
6. Code Unknown (2000)
Considered one of Haneke’s most advanced, enigmatic movies, constructed on the arbitrary-ensemble mannequin (however extra advanced than his earlier 71 Fragments), exhibiting us that issues don’t have so as to add up within the standard sense. Jigsaw items are lacking and the viewers should exert themselves to have interaction. Code Unknown is about race, tradition, city rage and alienation, and there are beneficiant, compassionate insights. Juliette Binoche leads the ensemble forged, enjoying an actor (whose audition as a serial killer’s sufferer seems at first to be truly occurring, flavouring the complete movie with concern). There are sensationally painful, uncomfortable encounters, most prominently between a spoilt younger man and a younger African man who confronts him about the way in which he treats a Romanian beggar. Powerfully assured, cerebral, uncompromising film-making.
5. Humorous Video games (1997)
Within the 90s, moviegoers thought they knew all in regards to the “dwelling invasion” horror style. Not like this, they didn’t. Haneke regulars Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar play a well-to-do couple who present up with their son at their lakeside trip dwelling, the place they’re terrorised by two well-spoken younger males, performed by Arno Frisch and Frank Giering. Funny Games was the movie that made Haneke a severe title, and with Von Trier, Noé, Breillat, Reygadas and Seidl, he grew to become first amongst equals within the new excessive cinema. Humorous Video games was his ferocious rebuke to Hollywood’s commodified violence that exploits shock worth for titillation and middleweight drama. The bodily violence right here is mainly off digital camera: however the real-time, moment-by-moment ordeal of concern and despair is all too specific. The dreamy Handel at first all of the sudden being blitzed by death-metal (Bare Metropolis’s Bonehead) is among the nice Euro-shock moments.
4. The Piano Trainer (2001)
Haneke’s sole literary adaptation (up to now) is from the novel of the identical title by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, whose darkish view on life made her a kindred spirit; and this movie might conceivably have helped her win the Nobel prize three years later. It’s in regards to the unacknowledged coldness and repression in well mannered European tradition, and options Isabelle Huppert as a supernova of evil and despair. She performs Erika Kohut, a superb piano instructor and Schubert scholar whose emotional life is frozen into stagnancy and self-harm. When she conceives a ardour for a good-looking younger pupil (Benoît Magimel), she tells him that their relationship can solely contain him beating her – and there may be nothing sex-positive or celebratory about this BDSM. In her severity, mad anger and concern of affection, Huppert’s efficiency is coldly magnificent.
3. The White Ribbon (2009)
One of many richest and most rewarding of Haneke’s later motion pictures (which even has grace-notes of humour) about group-guilt, the poisoned-herd mentality in denying or repressing the reality and the origins of German political behaviour in two world wars. The movie is shot in stark black-and-white in an imaginary German village in 1913: an outwardly placid neighborhood, however truly dysfunctional, plagued with nameless acts of malice and spite. Burghart Klaussner performs the pastor, a extreme disciplinarian who guidelines over his household and family with a rod of iron. When his youngsters err, they should put on a humiliating “white ribbon” round their arm till he’s glad they’ve atoned – it’s apparently a forerunner to the yellow star and the Nazi armband. There is no such thing as a clear answer to the thriller, however its sinister riddle is unforgettable.
2. Hidden (2005)
That is one other Haneke movie in regards to the uncanny world of video, additionally with an nearly Hollywood premise: a celebrated TV persona has a stalker who leaves sinister videotapes on his doorstep exhibiting the outside of his dwelling. (David Lynch did one thing related in Misplaced Freeway.) However this chilling movie makes it the idea of a preternatural nightmare and a political essay on France’s imperial guilt, with a ultimate deadpan sequence over the closing credit nearly, however not fairly, explaining the whole lot. Daniel Auteuil is the blandly immodest TV star fronting a cultural dialogue present, Juliette Binoche his spouse, they usually have a school-age son. Auteuil suspects that the particular person behind the videotapes is an Algerian to whom he as soon as did one thing terrible, linked with France’s repressed reminiscence of the bloodbath in Paris in 1961 – la nuit noire – when tons of of Algerian demonstrators have been overwhelmed and killed.
1. Amour (2012)
Haneke’s stark remedy of mortality and concern arguably revealed a brand new pressure of compassion and forgiveness in him on this intimate home drama. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play two retired music academics, Georges and Anne, a married couple who dwell fortunately sufficient in a chic Paris house. However when Anne suffers two strokes, she makes her husband promise that he won’t ever put her in a house. When he’s obliged to take care of her with out institutional palliative care, it turns into an ordeal through which all they’ve is their love – and maybe even that’s being dismantled as Anne’s identification is eroded. Their love is actual; it will not be a comfort, however it’s the solely factor that provides their fragile lives that means.
