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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2005
Country of origin:	France / Austria / Germany / Italy / USA
Director:	Michael Haneke
Genre:	Small scale tension
Starring:	Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387898/
Tagline:	No tagline
Favourite line:	N/A - Subtitled

Michael Haneke's an aggravating son of a bitch, and no mistake.

The plot:
A wealthy French couple, Georges a TV presenter, Anne a publisher, become concerned when a videotape arrives on their doorstep. Playing the cassette, they discover the entire runtime is filled with an external shot of their own home, in real time.
Nothing else.
Next come drawings, crude, childlike, all featuring blood gushing from a wound.
Frightened, they approach the police, but are told that unless they are genuinely threatened, there is nothing that can be done.
Then Georges begins to suspect who maybe behind the acts.
An incident in his childhood still haunts him. Could an event that transpired when he was just six years old really be turning their life upside down some forty years later?

I'm gonna warn you now, folks, this is going to feature one major spoiler.
I'll let you know when.
Being a Haneke movie, you know you are not in for something ordinary. The man responsible for the quite excellent Funny Games always attempts to shock his audience, to trouble and unsettle the viewer somehow. Arch-meta-movie-making is his raison d'etre, and this is no exception except, where in Funny Gamers he was lecturing us about enjoying the violence shown in movies,
(SPOILER COMING)
here he is telling us off for expecting movies to be resolved all nice and tidy and so, to demonstrate that life just ain’t like that, this movie, stretching out to near two and a half hours, simply ends.
No conclusion.
No resolution.
It just stops.
The main character, Georges, goes to bed.
Then it ends.
(SPOILER OVER!)
And, Jesus suffering sodomy, was I pissed off.
I get it Michael.
I get it.
Yes, how fucking clever you are.
What a lesson we've been taught.
It's the next day, and I'm still angry about it now, so he achieved precisely his intention. Kudos for that.
That issue aside, this is a well crafted study in small scale tension.
Massive attention to detail is provided, exaggerating the 'normalcy' of the environment. Where usually small talk would be restricted, here it is used as a constant, again domesticising the whole thing.
Clever, annoying, studied, frustrating, this is a cinephiles movie, and one that will surely challenge expectations.
You should watch it, but expect to be apoplectic by the end.