Director: Michael Haneke
Based on a real event in which a family inexplicably kill themselves after destroying all their possessions, Michael Haneke's brilliant debut feature film can be hard to watch, but that's only because the movie wants the audience to have a hard time. The first two thirds of the film are composed of two days in the life of this family, both days separated by a year. They are a bit boring at first, but in retrospect you realize that it is exactly the mundanity of these two days that is so important to what happens on the third day, in which everything unravels.
There is no direct given reason as to why everything unravels and this family does what they do. Instead we see it as a general symptom of their alienating and pointless daily lives. Haneke shows us this by intense close ups of everyday items, forcing us to actually notice the things we do not usually notice. Haneke is such a visceral and powerful filmmaker, he is definitely a provocateur, but he never uses gimmicks. He is not a filmmaker who is afraid to go after the audience and be immensely critical (See: Funny Games). With The Seventh Continent we see that Haneke always had this quality, and he has yet to lose it.
Grade: A-
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