Popular reviews

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  Review by Larry ★★★★½ 10

  Wake up to the radio at 6
  Take a bath.
  Give your child a kiss.
  Eat breakfast.
  Get a car wash.
  Drop wife at work.
  Work.
  Reach home for dinner.
  Sleep.
  Repeat.
  Rinse.
  Recycle.
  Restart.
  Remain.

  then...

  Something clicks.

  You don't know what it is. But it clicks.
  It comes flooding back to you. This unfamiliar ache. This pang of confusion. This sudden melancholy. It makes sense. And you realise the unbearable weight of your existence. It weighs deeply.

  You see it in the routine you live in. You feel it in the monotony that keeps you going. You hear it in the silence when you have nothing to speak.

  Then settles a fatigue that you've never felt in your…

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  Review by Rod Sedgwick ★★★★½ 8

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  ''Okay, time to say your prayers.''

  Michael Haneke's debut is a bitter pill to swallow, but the way he builds dread through a steady rhythm of imagery, refuses to rely on score to manipulate your emotions (Diegetic music only for Mr. Haneke) and denies you any answers except what you are willing to bring to the table, is evidence of a man exuding confidence in his craft and technique of storytelling. This is a grim ride, even more so knowing that its roots come from a true incident, yet it is a rewarding decent into darkness.

  Quite simply the films tells of a family who decide to end their existence through mutually agreed suicide, and whether you are aware of…

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  Review by CJ Probst ★★★★½ 6

  I think I can officially throw this out there. Michael Haneke is probably the coolest director since Stanley Kubrick. This son of a bitch has fucking ice water and venom flowing through his veins. There are only a handful of people In the world operating at this level.

  Watch a Haneke film. He doesn't have have to explain shit to you. The way he uses the medium his films synch directly into the emotional center of your brain and then rip your soul out, leaving you to try figure out what in the hell just happened to you.

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  Review by mike_sabathia ★★★★★ 3

  Michael Haneke is a filmmaker I've been meaning to explore further for a long time but haven't really found the time to do so. I was surprised to discover that The Seventh Continent was his debut feature, so confidently directed it is. It certainly deserves to be better known. Not sure why only two or three Haneke films usually get discussed.

  It's a tough, brutal film in many ways, a thoroughly unsentimental depiction of an alienated bourgeois family. The mood is established early on with a long shot as a car moves through a car wash with the family of three quietly observing the process. And this process is what the film details and deals with, the monotonous routine of…

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  Review by iana ★★★½

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  the part where they’re destroying everything in their house is like those satisfying video compilations which is probably a bad thing to say since the part after it is decidedly not as fun

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  Review by Irimiás and Petrina ★★★★½

  Sometimes I feel like I'm in an emotionally abusive relationship with Michael Haneke.

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 4

  The influence of violent media in the mass behavior of society is a passionate topic for Haneke since his debut. This time, he is dealing with his very first depiction of the destruction of the modernized urban family. Also, this spectacular achievement of a slowly-developing and blunt atmosphere depicts death in its most existentialist manner, while simultaneously tearing down the walls of the present microeconomic law worldwide. Terrifying truths that few auteurs dared to speak out loud. Bravo!

  96/100

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  Review by Lara Pop ★★★★★ 27

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  The moment the family flushed the money down the toilet and I realized that the seventh continent was NEVER supposed to be Australia and that they never intended to go there in the first place (and aimed for a place instead whose name begins with 's', continues with 'u', then 'i', and consists of 7 letters altogether) was the moment Michael Haneke destroyed the seemingly solid outer wall of human happiness and showed that our exterior & what we channel to the outside world is often the exact reverse of what's going down internally. Haneke's drama is of a psychological nature, yet it never delves into the inner ennui of its subjects. It depicts the exterior and demolishes it with a…

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  Review by DirkH ★★★★ 4

  Haneke's films are not ones I actively seek out. They are the type of films that need a right state of mind and a right moment to endure them. Now, that word may seem negative, but I mean it in the most positive way possible. His films to me are always an experience, the problem is they are hardly ever a nice, fulfilling one. They always leave me with questions and rather pessimistic.

  And the Seventh Continent is no exception.

  This is a film about disintegration. Haneke explores the true story of a family caught in the slipstream of bourgeois monotony, first revelling in it, but slowly realising it is not a place they want to be in. The film…

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  Review by MarcJR ★★★★½

  Only Michael Haneke could make going through a car wash this visceral and terrifying.

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  Review by braden ★★★★

  “Did you pretend to be blind?”

  Carefully revealing the exteriors of its characters through their monotonous lives before shifting into an immensely bleak final act, Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent attentively plays with audience expectations as it’s sparse, seemingly pointless narrative moves into unsettling territory; sinking you in through its gradual pacing to make it’s ending harrowingly powerful. Often obscuring faces and holding on frames of black between scenes, the film builds a feeling of apathy reflecting its detached characters - uncomfortably imprinting their perspective in its meditation on middle class life and making the dark material feel numbly depressing rather than shocking or provocative. As expected from the director it’s unapologetically difficult and doesn’t make any attempt to explain itself; steadily absorbing you into its rhythm and leaving you incredibly disturbed.

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  Review by Remobo ★★★½ 10

  "I tried to tell this story without giving any answers. I wanted to tell the facts of the story with flashbacks. I worked on it for six weeks and couldn't do it, because each flashback was an explanation. At a certain point, I realized that you can't tell it like this if you want to keep the frightful secret. And I decided to use a kind of protocol: three years, one day. We see what happens. And it's up to the viewer to find his own answers." - Michael Haneke

  There.....That. This. That's how he does it. That's how he gets me every time. He read a story in the newspaper that inspired this movie, but it had too much…