If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Excellent but underrated film

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Haneke begins his debut film with a shot of a family going through a car wash that lasts more than 8 minutes. Not exactly the most riveting of beginnings. The next sequence is something everyone can relate to; waking up to the buzzing alarm clock, getting ready for the day's events, and having breakfast. This has a inkling of familiarity to it, because for almost the entirety of this scene Haneke avoids showing our family's faces. He shoots closeups of milk being poured, of coffee being prepared, of shoes being tied, of pet fish being fed. It is only until later that we get a clear view of these people. Instead, what characterises them is this droning voice-over of a letter being narrated from the mother Anna to her in- laws. Life is well. Georg is on the brink of a promotion. Alexander has recovered from his mental breakdown. See, it's nothing but good news. At the start of part 2, Haneke repeats the same sequences. The waking up, the breakfast, the getting ready for work. Again, the droning voice-over bears good news. George is head of his division. Alexander is much better. The new boss is coming for dinner. Posters, and dreams, reveal the same recurring landscape of an Australian beach, its waves pushing up against the shore. This has an eerie calmness about it, because in the background is a giant mountain range that renders the waves physically impossible, like a fantasy gone wild. But they yearn for it anyway. In the repetition, the daily struggle becomes a slow, torturous existence, marked by these empty soulless routines that begin to consume them. By the time part 3 rolls around, the voice-over slips into its final, chilling denouement. Haneke's stylistic tendencies are most obvious in his debut, and less restrained. He uses no non-diegetic sounds so that the family has to endure the uncomfortable silence and the buzz of all things living while they barely live themselves. This allows the blackout cuts to flow from one period to another, and symbolise passing of time while nothing else changes at all. The washed out, pale palette captures these sterile environments at their peak banality, and the long takes, still and unmoving, linger for longer than necessary until the presence of the camera becomes uncomfortable. He then shatters these portraits with moments of such startling and unnerving emotion; Alexander breaking into sobs at the dinner table, Anna slapping Eva after promising not to do so, her later breaking down in the car, and so on. This mood is repeated in the final segment to such stunning effect. They systematically destroy their lives in the same vapid, tired manner as they have been behaving throughout the film. They get their affairs in order, delegate the shop to Alexander, close their bank accounts and withdraw all their cash. Then the entire house is trashed. Furniture is ripped beyond repair. Clothes are cut into ribbons. Cupboards are empty. This is all done silently, devoid of any emotion or rage or distress. Then again, he shatters the air of nonchalance in the only way he can, through the young Eva, who after the days in and days out of feeding the fish, cannot take smashing the fish tank. Later Anna reacts the same way as she sobs over her corpse, while an almost comatose George watches on and follows put with the suicidal dose. It takes a great deal of skill and sensibility to make a film with this sort of subject matter, and it is even more impressive in a debut. What is crucial to its execution is its ability not to understand why a family would do such a thing...but to merely linger in the presence of their despair. Nothing is learned or gained, but we attempt to rationalise and decipher it anyway. Haneke would later master this concept in Hidden, but here is is just as horrifying. Against so many screen portrayals of suicide that are romanticised and exaggerated, this rings truer, more painful.

It's 1989. As the Cold War was taking its last desperate gasps of air, filled with the debris of that crumbling wall, a demure, isolated and all-too-familiar middle-class family sits at their breakfast table in Austria as they continue to perform their meandering daily activities. Is this a better life? Is this what the Western, free-market promised? Just a bunch of junk they don't need, depressing karaoke television and convenience food? Did this family miss the comfort of Communism? We don't know, but without getting all Fight Club about it, Michael Haneke's debut, The Seventh Continent displays the bourgeois misery that serves as the pilot light of the ensuing self-destruction of Western civilization. With his cold-clinical style using diegetic sound and long takes that challenge our patience, Haneke brings us something more sobering and nihilistic than anything that David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk could brainstorm. What makes this film so effective is the vicarious nature of the narrative. These people did what I did in the last week and will probably do again tomorrow. We dine with them, we shower with them. We see ourselves in them. While they are economically stable, they seem to have lost their souls. In typical Haneke fashion, he dissects the ordinary family and isolates their experiences to capture their emptiness. He brings out the themes that we would see in Funny Games and Time of The Wolf. The emasculated, apathetic father, the mother whose emotions are on the edge, as we see when she is going through the car wash that reminds her of the accident they saw in the rain. It's a Kafka tale with no transformation. Nearly a decade later, the US took a crack at this theme with the Oscar-sweeping American Beauty. With that film, Lester Burnham gave the viewer a glimpse into the emotional failure of the American Dream. Yet Lester took charge and gave himself what he wanted. As he defied the control of his wife and shed responsibility, it became the ultimate Men's Rights battle-cry. And as with other American suburban satires, like Happiness, there is still a degree of mythology. Life can be that bad for some people, but not for every member of one family. It comes off as a sort of misery-porn. But Haneke does not allow the audience to have what it wants. He wants to probe us and make us question our priorities and collective reality. There is no dream. No fantasy, because what their wasted potential as humans is too depressing to think about. No escape. Or maybe there is, but what is the cost of that escape? Without giving too much away, there is a climactic sequence in which the family puts their priorities to the test by destroying their property. What about the record collection? Is that the husband's or the wife's? Is there a feminist subtext behind a woman destroying a man's record collection? And finally, as far as destruction goes, I will say, that the fish tank scene in this film far exceeds the potency of the Martin Riggs "MINEY MO!" from Lethal Weapon 2. .....Also from 1989.....(scratching chin)

Michael Haneke is the man for movies that document humanity and human relations (but mostly lack thereof) with disturbing precision, and make the viewers increasingly uncomfortable as he takes them through the darkest parts of the human psyche. His movies like Caché (Hidden) and Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) have been called 'psychological horror' due to their unrelenting talent to unearth the worst characteristics of humanity and evoke a maximum of psychological unease with a minimum of tricks and gimmicks. A self-proclaimed opponent of movies that are merely entertainment, Haneke is very critical of Hollywood films which, he feels, force their truth upon the viewer. Now you don't have to agree with the artist to enjoy his work (I don't think it's coincidence that about 2/3 of the IMDb top 250 consists of Hollywood movies), but Haneke's movies sure lack an absolute truth that we as a viewer have to find ourselves. His movies make us think, disturb, repulse and otherwise engage us, provide no easy answers and leave room for multiple interpretations, which is one hallmark of great cinema (nothing wrong with good entertainment, though). Haneke's cinematic debut already contains the building blocks that are the foundation of much of his later work: people seemingly normal on the surface, but largely dysfunctional on the inside; tensions between family members; long, static camera shots without music, which register events rather than manipulate them. He introduces us to an average family in a rich Western country (which happens to be Austria). The father, mother and daughter seem to lead a perfectly normal life, although we get the feeling from the start that most of this life exists of tedious and joyless repetition of mundane acts, such as dressing, making coffee, working and cooking. There is not much that gives their life a little more color, even watching television or taking the daughter to bed seems like a chore in an endless routine. Haneke uses voice-overs from the parents to illustrate that they have no material shortages or other reason to be unhappy, but the images superimposed on it tell a different story. It is in the subtlety of these scenes that Haneke shows his craftsmanship; he does not manipulate, nothing is said aloud, but we connect with these people anyway, understanding why the daughter fakes blindness because she is lonely and craves attention, or why the mother suddenly starts crying for no apparent reason, and the husband doesn't bother to find out because he knows the source of the pain all too well. When the family finally witnesses an accident with fatal outcome, the audience is being prepared for the solution they have found.Also infamous are the sudden emotional outbursts between all the serene calmness. The second half is a prime example of this effective contradiction. The family has finally decided how to escape their personal hell, so they calmly arrange all their affairs and have one last copious meal. It is particularly gut-wrenching to see how they then start tearing down their place and destroying almost everything they collected throughout their lives, as if to say that their lives have been so meaningless that they simply want nothing to remain of it. Rarely was there a more visceral and effective way to show a character's self-chosen descent into oblivion. Haneke manages to leave the mother and child with a shred of humanity, though: the daughter crying in agony over the death of her beloved fish, and the mother tearfully preparing to take a fatal overdose, but resolutely forcing the pills in her mouth anyway are profoundly heart-breaking. However, the uncompromising horror of a completely vanished will to live becomes apparent as the father calmly listens to his wife gasping and choking to death, and, in what almost seems a mockery of his daily professional routine, makes a calm and systematic note of his wife's and daughter's death on the wall, before dying himself. The final text that reveals this story to be based on actual events delivers a final blow by showing that this story is no mere product of a writer's imagination, but a grim reality. Haneke's distant way of filming has become his trademark. Most of the time he reduces scenes to the bare essence, letting the calm determination and efficiency of the characters tell the story or unfold the horror while the audience observes; at other times he draws attention to things by purposely NOT showing them, or merely suggesting them. It is amazing how he manages to have images and scenes stick with us without showing anything actually explicit or shocking. It is his way to force the audience to think, identify and draw its own conclusions. I myself had mixed feelings about the characters, feeling both sympathy for their situation, yet at the same time I couldn't help wondering why they didn't try to actively make something of their unhappy life, instead of waiting for life to happen. He leaves it up to us to decide whether these characters are victims of a hollowed-out Western lifestyle that forces its people into an empty existence of consumerism, or whether they are pathetic people that simply miss some basic human talent to be happy. Haneke is not the one for easy answers, only tough questions.

If I could go back, I would never have seen this film, yet I know that such a thing is not possible, nor is it really what I want. I am "glad" I have seen this film like I am "glad" to be informed about the suffering of others in the daily newspaper. This is not a happy film. This is not a film that will make you feel good. If you feel that everything in life will be wonderful after viewing this film, you have missed the point. If, on the other hand, you become so frightened at your life and what you have failed to make of it that you instantly shoot yourself in the bed, you have missed the point. I do not believe that this film was made to show suffering just for the sake of suffering. Why would any film do that? There are far too many hints and visual clues for there to be no meaning. There are reasons why the camera angles are the way that they are. There are shots of objects instead of people for a reason, which is to show the materialism of human beings and the ways in which humans try to define their life through media sources and other sources instead of human contact. There are daily rituals, such as eating, cleaning, listening to music, and writing letters to family, that add up to nothing because no meaning has been given to them. These characters try to find meaning, but they never give meaning to anything. And because of this, they suffer.This is the basic plot: a daughter tells her schoolteacher that she cannot see. The teacher contacts the parents and asks the daughter if she is blind. The daughter says she is not. After this, the family slowly (and I put emphasis on the word "slowly") deteriorates. This is, essentially, all that happens. Subtle does not even begin to describe how slow this process is. Subtle should be banned from the list of adjectives used to describe this film. For those who like to see a family deteriorate by means of arguing, shouting, and phrases such as "You never loved me!" and "I just want our family back!", this is not a film for you. I cannot imagine how short the shooting script must have been, but I imagine it was so small that it continuously got lost during shooting. A lengthy script is never a requirement for a film, which is (after all) a visual medium. The lack of a proper story leaves the viewer with a large time to think. Very little is really explained. It is not a "blame" movie, by which I mean that this is not a film that makes references to why something happened. "Oh, she started crying because her boss is mad at her and they just got into an argument." "Oh, he just destroyed that lamp because he was upset over the death of his mother eleven years ago." Because there is no explanation, I found myself constantly trying to make one. I was obsessively trying to understand why the characters did what they did. Was it because of something in the past? Were they upset over the prospect of their future? When no answers could be found, I looked for even smaller details, such as colors and micro-expressions on a person's face. In this sense, the film is brilliant in that you cannot stop thinking about it. Is this what the filmmaker wanted us to do? There is a good possibility that it is. If this is the case, then the film succeeds on more than one level. At the end, I found myself not just thinking about the lives of the characters (which, knowing that it is based on a true story, made it even all the more disturbing), but also about the lives of others and, eventually, about my own life. This is not an inspiring film, but it is a motivational one. There are two types of motivational films: those where the characters get beat up by the world but decide to fight back and those where the characters just get beat up. Are both inspiring? No. Are both motivational? Yes, especially the second of the two. Sometimes the image of seeing someone fail can become so frightening and so nauseating that we think, "But how can they do that to themselves?" The most frightening part of the whole thing is not when we see their lives, but when we look at our own lives and notice the similarities. This is The Seventh Continent.