Best movie of this year hands down!

How sad is this?

Best movie ever!

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Haneke destroying the sacred temple of the atomistic family. The values we associate with the family, love, security, trust, it being a shelter against the world, turn in on themselves to destroy it. For the love within family already involves violence, the security already involves egoism and selfishness, its seclusion involves alienation. What happens before (the slap, the carwash, their shopping routines) are not much different than the ending in this respect. The aquarium was a metaphor of the ideal of a happy, secure home, amidst the horrors and chaos of the external world. Its destruction is painful because it is the destruction of the dream, the acknowledgment of reality. The hardcore reality is that, family is no refuge from the horrors and terrors of life (and death), it is an extension of it. In death we are alone.

A family, starved for attention and desperate to escape their daily life of abrasive routine, decide to turn things around one year and go against the routine. The film depicts their lives in three painful years of isolation, meaningless actions, and disillusionment. The first two-thirds of the film show the loud and hectic world that they are inexplicably a part of. Everything is just a series of actions. The semi-apocalyptic sequence shows a kind of desperate forcefulness of life that never breaks though, and the claustrophobic nature comes across as frighteningly unnerving. Tarkovsky would be proud.The Seventh Continent was the second Michael Haneke film I had seen after The Piano Teacher. While I do not think that it is as honest a film as The Piano Teacher, I do applaud the fearless dynamic of the film to be completely devoid of style and of typical film conventions in order to depict a world that grows increasingly unpredictable and harrowing. The film is very Hitchcock-like in how it slowly and quietly builds it's themes involving desolate emotions. It is a tremendously scary film, but it is scary in a way that comes off a lot stronger after the film has finished and you allow it's images to swim around in your head for a while. The loss of passion and of feeling in a human being, to my knowledge, has never been depicted in such a pessimistic way. This is a very angry film. This is a very resentful film. This is a film that celebrates sadness and anger and I hated watching it. When the film finds time to depict humanity, it writes it off like it is useless. What makes me even more angry about the film, in a way, is how you can almost feel Haneke behind the camera feeling resentful and wanting to punish the audience for wanting to view a film with a good story and a moving and engaging plot. Haneke goes so far out of his way to provide nothing in the way of narrative power and instead opts to craft an angry and traumatizing film. What makes the film work is it's power to provide some deeply haunting imagery and some truly worthwhile substance that I couldn't help but appreciate. Two of these three characters have complete control over everything that happens and they obviously feel that what they do in the final act of the film is most beneficial. Who am I to judge their own control over their lives. What pisses me off is how simple minded they are as characters. I just feel that Haneke prefers to emphasize these problems that these characters share, and what I am bothered by was that he didn't make it less obvious.Overall, it's not one of Haneke's best films, but for a debut theatrical picture it is about as good as one can get. What strikes me as rather unusual about this film, when compared to his other films, is how it suffers from the same major problems that pretty much all of his films have. For example, he has never been able to build any sympathy with any of his characters, at least from the films of his that I've seen, and this film is no different in that regard. The film of his that I personally think suffers the most from it is Funny Games (both versions). With his picture Cache, it only became a problem early on in the film, and in Benny's Video and Hour of the Wolf it helped add to the atmosphere while damaging the humanity of the films in question. I think that The Seventh Continent shows plenty of promise with Haneke and is extremely riveting at times, but it's easily the absolute worst place to start if you are interested in getting into his films. It will not leave you with a good impression of his work, and only after watching Funny Games and Cache (his most easily accessible films in my opinion) will you be able to catch his reoccurring themes.

I think that many people will be able to identify with this film. As always, I made a point of knowing virtually nothing about it before I saw it, and I'd recommend doing the same. If you know about the plot beforehand, the impact will be markedly ruined. The first thought that came to mind after the first few sequences was "they haven't shown anyone's face yet".. I guess that's the point. If you are reading this, then you most likely are not starving, and are amongst the rich 1 billion of the world. So the actions portrayed initially in this middle class existence needn't any face, as they pertain to all of us, we the regurgitators of human aspirations (weird phrasing). We don't have a face, as there is nothing to tell us apart from the next person. Anyway, it's absurd to think that the mental process that took over the family is considered an exception, but the fact that it is only highlights how sick our society is, refusing to remodel this cataclysmic and decerebrate way of being. I was affected by the subsequent events that transpired, and one particular scene still haunts me in a vicious way, although it cannot be mentioned here... suffice to say it broke free from a certain degree of apathy shown by the main characters throughout, revealing the desperate and twisted cry of raw emotion that can exude from even the most planned chaos. Watch it all the way through, it is meant to bore you for a while, it wouldn't be the same if it didn't.

This movie is not so bad. I rented it because I was intrigued by the conceptual gloom it promised. But the actions of the family are not committed wholeheartedly, the mother is reluctant to follow through, indicating a hidden normalcy to the characters. The suicide is referenced in voice-over letters and in explanations as to how it "should" be done before it actually is done, (e.g. the father breaking down a shelf and telling his wife, who is drawn into the room and bewildered by the scene, "it is best if we do it systematically"). I felt that it would have been stronger if the family had not referenced it, but had just done it in an organic, fluid and uncompromising manner. When the characters have lines foreshadowing their suicide, it gives it a predictability as banal as the bureaucratic world the family is abandoning. I haven't seen any of Michael Haneke's other movies, but he seems like a very deliberate, intellect-wielding director. Sort of like a contemporary Godard, although he had to break from Godard in order to replace him. I was watching this with a friend, who said, "I feel like he is making a clear-cut argument." I felt the same way. Although I am not opposed to this way of approaching film-making, it detracts from the characters, because they become tools of the director's thesis rather than living, emotion-showing individuals. This movie is not disturbing, it isn't depressing, it's just a point of view, cut and dry. I did like one thing about this movie- the way that it was shot. It has a photographic crispness to it.