The Seventh Continent

For fans of the more recent 'Cache' or 'The Piano Teacher', it is worth going back to look at the start of Michael Haneke's feature career (now released in this 3-disc set), when he was still working in Austria. 'The Seventh Continent' (1989) is as curious a film as anything he has since produced, deliberately refusing to offer the viewer any consoling reasons for its perplexing outcome.

I won't go into too much detail, but it concerns the mundane life of an isolated bourgeois Austrian family, who go through their daily tasks (the carwash, the school, the job promotion) with an occasional degree of unease, but nothing out of the ordinary. Haneke creates an atmosphere of awkwardness with his camera-work, which cuts off heads, focussing more often on limbs or still objects. The final act is suitably depressing. And watch out for the bravura scene involving a fish tank.