This story could have effectively been told in about 25 minutes.

A simple and incredible film on the suffocating stoicism and failed liberation of a supposedly ordinary middle-class family. I loved the creepy minimalism of this family's day-to-day business, but I thought "I need something after all this casualness to make this film a masterpiece". What I got was one of the greatest third acts I've ever seen in a movie.

Some pretty raw talent - the first hour is aggressive, and a bit too eager to cue us in the right direction, but the ending is classic Haneke - and thank god for that.

Some surprisingly intimate scenes, but Haneke certainly didn't find his voice along the way. It's here at the start. And now I really wish he had made a Talking Heads music video back in the day.

"Michael Haneke could be cinema's Debbie Downer, if only he had any sense of humor." - Fernando F. Croce

By far one of the most draining movie I've seen. Months later, it still haunts me.

Possibly one the most disturbing film I've ever seen, especially going in not knowing anything about the story. Haneke once again forces viewers to confront themselves, and pulls no punches doing it.

Chilling.

One of the most mundane films I've seen, although that's exactly the point. It all builds to a powerful third act. It's pretty much what I expected from Haneke.

Can living a comfortable middle class lives in modern society be a terrible thing? That's what this well-made film seems to be asking as depicts a family that behaves in puzzling way. Haneke, to his credit, does not provide any answers. Reminiscent of Gus Van Sant's *Elephant*.

An overwhelmingly visceral film on humanity's tendency to idealise things, and a warning about placing so much credence in the hopeful images that religion (the young kid prays every night) or the media (we see an image of the Australian beach on an advertising poster) can give us that we overlook the good in life - notice how the daughter's drawings, the family's music collection and photograph albums are all destroyed - and rush headlong for the perfect image our minds are convinced is real.

Poczatek leniwy, ale po zakonczeniu na dlugie godziny pozostawil mnie w ponurym nastroju. Mocna rzecz.

This is Michael Haneke's first feature film, and his 'objective' style is all over it. There is barely any plot, but rather a seemingly ordinary family doing mundane things with little dialogue, but for some reason it's really interesting. There is quite a lot to take away from this film. It also has a classic Haneke bleak ending.

The Seventh Continent depicts its horrific conclusion without providing any reasons or explanations. Needless to say, it's quite unsettling. I'm not sure if it's all that powerful, however. Like most of Hanake's work, it's original but coldly constructed and calculated. I actually think it was wise to not include any answers, but I couldn't shake the feeling that Hanake's was trying to manipulate me into feeling something, and that made me slightly resentful.

For all the effort expended in showing the individual acts that added up to the totality, one thing is avoided: the planning. Why? Was it a lack of artistic imagination, an evasion of the risk of trying to portray this kind of discussion unsatisfactorily? Or might it have been that the director could not think of a way to include such scenes without showing more of the actual circumstances than he was really interested in exploring? In either case, the result is less than it might have been.

This is a film meant to be understood, not simply watched. However, this is absolutely painfully difficult to do because of the pacing of this beast. The first two acts are frustratingly slow (although that's essentially the point of this film), building at a crawling pace to the blistering third act. The heel-face turn of the third act is sudden like an oceanic drop off, making the wait well worth it; if only it wasn't so damn agonizing to get there.

too subtle to enjoy

Hey Georg - Anna - get over it. Director doesn't prove his case. It's a downer.

Really monotonous as a whole due to slow pacing and focus on the ordinary, but includes one of the best scenes ever made. I won't say more, but it forces you to consider how much of your outlook on morals is rhetoric versus actual sensitivity.

A film worth watching. Suspenseful and meaningful. But I gave it a low score anyway because films from this period of Haneke (I mean The Seventh Continent, Benny's video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) somehow don't really capture me at a gut level. I don't understand why (Funny Games totally captured me, for instance). Maybe because I watched these three on DVD, maybe because I wasn't in the mood (i.e. emotionally unavailable) at the time I watched them.

Again Haneke shows us an average bourgeois family being shaken to its core. Except this time, it's self-inflicted. It's very unsettling, and the tedium of the first hour pays off with the shattering events that follow it. I appreciate what Haneke is getting at, and his work is powerful, but one thing did bother me. It's based on a true story, and by Haneke's own admission, there were real reasons for what happened. But he shrugs them off as unimportant and uses the story for his own agenda.

An interesting feature that takes a while to get started, but the second half is worth it. There's some great, almost Bressonian visual storytelling and an effective portrayal of the bleakness of existence, but the pacing needs work and the film lags in places.