Michael Haneke
5 titles · european arthouse
Two polite young men in tennis whites knock at a holiday house to borrow eggs, and by the end of Funny Games they have killed the family and addressed the audience about it twice. The films are built to implicate whoever is watching. A middle-class Austrian family dismantles its own life without explanation in The Seventh Continent; Amour stays in one Paris flat while a husband cares for his wife after a stroke. Long static takes, no score, and violence kept offscreen where it is worse.
Signature
- Static long takes and an absent score.
- Violence heard, or seen after the fact, rarely staged.
- Bourgeois European households taken apart from inside.
- Direct address and other devices that name the viewer.
fit
Lineage
Earlier films these works draw on, and the films they went on to shape — each link checked to name a film that actually came first.