UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

oOoBarracuda From my introduction to Michael Haneke through his 1997 film, Funny Games, I knew he shared an important quality with one of my favorite filmmakers. Like David Lynch, Michael Haneke doesn't care if the audience is comfortable while watching his films. Haneke extends his scenes past the point where the audience watching thinks is necessary, creating a hypnotic trance that one is unable to look away from. This ability of Haneke's to espouse the audience's attention forces the viewer to become an active participant in his films and thrusts us into an often much-needed self-examination. Haneke's feature film debut, The Seventh Continent takes an in-depth look at the lives of a family chained by the shackles of their expected existence willing to go to extreme measures to escape the monotonous confines of their daily existence.The long takes Haneke favors throughout The Seventh Continent, introduce the audience to a young family living in Europe that live in precisely the way that is expected of them. Georg Schober (Dieter Berner) works diligently at his career, always placing himself in the best possible position to advance through promotions and better situate himself in his profession. Anna Schober (Birgit Doll), an optometrist, steadfastly maintains her family's home, dutifully completing all the tasks and errands to keep the everyday lives of her family running. Anna is also reacting to the death of a parent, which has devastated her brother, assuming the role of the strong focused sibling taxed with the burden of maintaining her parents' business. The youngest member of the family, Evi, fills her time coloring pictures, doing her homework, and occasionally causing mischief at school by feigning blindness. Neither Georg's career advancements, Anna's mourning, nor Evi's misbehavior is consequential to the story--they are simply moments that happen in each of their lives and fills their days. This is precisely Haneke's point; most of what we do in our lives are mundane activities which fill our time until we die. Whether it be a scene filmed in real time at a car wash or listening to someone relay a story during an eye exam, Haneke gives us these moments in as similar a way as they actually occur, removing all sense of grandiose filmmaking, forcing the audience to see themselves in the lives of those depicted on screen. It's hypnotizing they way we can scoff at collective suicide, yet through watching the events that lead up to the act come to understand the universality of the expectations we adhere to. Every move is repetitive, the same food is served every day at breakfast, the same pommel horse is jumped over in gym class, the same filling station is visited when the car is low on fuel. We often live our lives thinking of the future, fooling ourselves into believing that the monotony we serve daily is crucial to our growth until we are shocked to learn that the future we have been striving towards has become the past. We get so lost in the day-to-day that we need Haneke to make clear that the way we actually live our lives doesn't make all that much sense once analyzed. The cold emotionless state maintained in the Schober home is sobering to watch. No amount of intimacy brings the family closer together. Even after making love, Georg and Anna immediately return to the distance between each other that fills their days. Not only does one hardly see any affection between the members of the Schober family, but we also rarely see them enjoy conversations with each other. The cold, detached atmosphere isn't confined to their home, either. Each time they exchange currency for a service, the audience is afforded a glimpse into the lives of everyone they interact with, each doing their job or performing a service while all vitality seems to have been drained from their being. Through the entire runtime of The Seventh Continent, we don't see a single meaningful human connection. There is even a scene in which a man recently released from his employment with Georg, returns for his things and isn't given a single embrace of encouragement or a kind word. His appearance disrupts the work because he is unexpected, further cementing Haneke's notion that our lives are simply made up of a series of repeated actions, and we are stricken by the break from routine when interrupted. Despite the lack of compassionate connectivity, I would argue that Haneke's feature is one of the most humanistic films I have recently seen, because it gives hope to our existence and alerts us to think critically about our society.

sharky_55 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.

Field78 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.

heavy metal is the law I saw this movie recently and it blew my mind. The long shots, showing the mundane aspects of life. The camera aiming at the actions rather than the characters, symbolizing the every day ordeal of a conformist life. The eternal agony of a family, who slowly tears apart from everything that connects them with the world.This is not a pleasant movie to watch. It's sad, bleak, disturbing and angry; and Haneke doesn't make it easier to the viewers. He presents life as it is, without any dramatization; and what it strikes me the most is the pace in which he presents it. The characters doesn't shout (they speak every once in a while), fight or cry their hearts out; they just keep on doing the same things they do every day. However, as you watch closer, you sense that something is completely wrong.To me this is as an existential film as you can get. The world is there: raw, unsympathetic and indifferent. Everything happens without a reason, without hope; and the character's lack of desire to confront the nothingness of an empty life is the central theme of this movie."What happens when people are dead from the inside?" That's what I asked myself after watching this cold, cynical, gem of a movie. Can be someone dead from the inside and alive from the outside?. If so, could that person communicate with any other person? How can we avoid the meaningless things in life? Should we fight them back or surrender to them? Watch this movie and then you may find the answers to those questions..... or may be not. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!. Avoid watching it if you're a bit depressed. This movie is bleak and challenging as hell.