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.

Frederick Malouf Maybe this is a film as therapy for suiciders. Everything is just so intentionally bleak. I feel so sorry for the family that did this in real life.If someone needs you, you can't die. If you really want to die, do it in the best environment possible. This could change your mind. If I was ever to do this, I'd go to a beach or something. No doubt that would wake me up and then I'd be hungry and go buy fish and chips, or something.I guess people commit suicide because they are so alone. How can so many people be alone in a world with so much potential for communication? 1: A lot of what is discussed is rubbish. 2: There is little means for expressing oneself with others.Too much processing, at the expense of an outdated economic structure.OKOKOK! Couldn't help the last part, but it is honest.Henneke looks like an enlightened person, really to express these insane, depressing things he shows in his films. I suggest, instead of outlawing Hanneke from his work, change society to something more fruitful so we do not give him the fuel to make these depressing movies. I'd wager he would love that as much as I.:)

RisingStar12 If I could go back, I would never have seen this film, yet I know that such a thing is not possible, nor is it really what I want. I am "glad" I have seen this film like I am "glad" to be informed about the suffering of others in the daily newspaper. This is not a happy film. This is not a film that will make you feel good. If you feel that everything in life will be wonderful after viewing this film, you have missed the point. If, on the other hand, you become so frightened at your life and what you have failed to make of it that you instantly shoot yourself in the bed, you have missed the point. I do not believe that this film was made to show suffering just for the sake of suffering. Why would any film do that? There are far too many hints and visual clues for there to be no meaning. There are reasons why the camera angles are the way that they are. There are shots of objects instead of people for a reason, which is to show the materialism of human beings and the ways in which humans try to define their life through media sources and other sources instead of human contact. There are daily rituals, such as eating, cleaning, listening to music, and writing letters to family, that add up to nothing because no meaning has been given to them. These characters try to find meaning, but they never give meaning to anything. And because of this, they suffer.This is the basic plot: a daughter tells her schoolteacher that she cannot see. The teacher contacts the parents and asks the daughter if she is blind. The daughter says she is not. After this, the family slowly (and I put emphasis on the word "slowly") deteriorates. This is, essentially, all that happens. Subtle does not even begin to describe how slow this process is. Subtle should be banned from the list of adjectives used to describe this film. For those who like to see a family deteriorate by means of arguing, shouting, and phrases such as "You never loved me!" and "I just want our family back!", this is not a film for you. I cannot imagine how short the shooting script must have been, but I imagine it was so small that it continuously got lost during shooting. A lengthy script is never a requirement for a film, which is (after all) a visual medium. The lack of a proper story leaves the viewer with a large time to think. Very little is really explained. It is not a "blame" movie, by which I mean that this is not a film that makes references to why something happened. "Oh, she started crying because her boss is mad at her and they just got into an argument." "Oh, he just destroyed that lamp because he was upset over the death of his mother eleven years ago." Because there is no explanation, I found myself constantly trying to make one. I was obsessively trying to understand why the characters did what they did. Was it because of something in the past? Were they upset over the prospect of their future? When no answers could be found, I looked for even smaller details, such as colors and micro-expressions on a person's face. In this sense, the film is brilliant in that you cannot stop thinking about it. Is this what the filmmaker wanted us to do? There is a good possibility that it is. If this is the case, then the film succeeds on more than one level. At the end, I found myself not just thinking about the lives of the characters (which, knowing that it is based on a true story, made it even all the more disturbing), but also about the lives of others and, eventually, about my own life. This is not an inspiring film, but it is a motivational one. There are two types of motivational films: those where the characters get beat up by the world but decide to fight back and those where the characters just get beat up. Are both inspiring? No. Are both motivational? Yes, especially the second of the two. Sometimes the image of seeing someone fail can become so frightening and so nauseating that we think, "But how can they do that to themselves?" The most frightening part of the whole thing is not when we see their lives, but when we look at our own lives and notice the similarities. This is The Seventh Continent.

tonymurphylee A family, starved for attention and desperate to escape their daily life of abrasive routine, decide to turn things around one year and go against the routine. The film depicts their lives in three painful years of isolation, meaningless actions, and disillusionment. The first two-thirds of the film show the loud and hectic world that they are inexplicably a part of. Everything is just a series of actions. The semi-apocalyptic sequence shows a kind of desperate forcefulness of life that never breaks though, and the claustrophobic nature comes across as frighteningly unnerving. Tarkovsky would be proud.The Seventh Continent was the second Michael Haneke film I had seen after The Piano Teacher. While I do not think that it is as honest a film as The Piano Teacher, I do applaud the fearless dynamic of the film to be completely devoid of style and of typical film conventions in order to depict a world that grows increasingly unpredictable and harrowing. The film is very Hitchcock-like in how it slowly and quietly builds it's themes involving desolate emotions. It is a tremendously scary film, but it is scary in a way that comes off a lot stronger after the film has finished and you allow it's images to swim around in your head for a while. The loss of passion and of feeling in a human being, to my knowledge, has never been depicted in such a pessimistic way. This is a very angry film. This is a very resentful film. This is a film that celebrates sadness and anger and I hated watching it. When the film finds time to depict humanity, it writes it off like it is useless. What makes me even more angry about the film, in a way, is how you can almost feel Haneke behind the camera feeling resentful and wanting to punish the audience for wanting to view a film with a good story and a moving and engaging plot. Haneke goes so far out of his way to provide nothing in the way of narrative power and instead opts to craft an angry and traumatizing film. What makes the film work is it's power to provide some deeply haunting imagery and some truly worthwhile substance that I couldn't help but appreciate. Two of these three characters have complete control over everything that happens and they obviously feel that what they do in the final act of the film is most beneficial. Who am I to judge their own control over their lives. What pisses me off is how simple minded they are as characters. I just feel that Haneke prefers to emphasize these problems that these characters share, and what I am bothered by was that he didn't make it less obvious.Overall, it's not one of Haneke's best films, but for a debut theatrical picture it is about as good as one can get. What strikes me as rather unusual about this film, when compared to his other films, is how it suffers from the same major problems that pretty much all of his films have. For example, he has never been able to build any sympathy with any of his characters, at least from the films of his that I've seen, and this film is no different in that regard. The film of his that I personally think suffers the most from it is Funny Games (both versions). With his picture Cache, it only became a problem early on in the film, and in Benny's Video and Hour of the Wolf it helped add to the atmosphere while damaging the humanity of the films in question. I think that The Seventh Continent shows plenty of promise with Haneke and is extremely riveting at times, but it's easily the absolute worst place to start if you are interested in getting into his films. It will not leave you with a good impression of his work, and only after watching Funny Games and Cache (his most easily accessible films in my opinion) will you be able to catch his reoccurring themes.