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.

Haneke destroying the sacred temple of the atomistic family. The values we associate with the family, love, security, trust, it being a shelter against the world, turn in on themselves to destroy it. For the love within family already involves violence, the security already involves egoism and selfishness, its seclusion involves alienation. What happens before (the slap, the carwash, their shopping routines) are not much different than the ending in this respect. The aquarium was a metaphor of the ideal of a happy, secure home, amidst the horrors and chaos of the external world. Its destruction is painful because it is the destruction of the dream, the acknowledgment of reality. The hardcore reality is that, family is no refuge from the horrors and terrors of life (and death), it is an extension of it. In death we are alone.

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.

This is the third Haneke film I've seen (Funny Games and Cache being the others), and it is pretty obvious to me that it is the first one he made. The cinematography and atmosphere were there, but the story and character development were not. Bleak, emotionally dead people (seriously some of the lamest, unsympathetic characters I have ever seen) commit suicide because the boring, repetitive motions of their daily lives that the director chooses to show us are boring and repetitive. All allusions and foreshadowing are heavy handed, and Haneke uses extended black screen cuts repeatedly to slow the pace even further. All of this leads to a film that bores the viewer to the point where the characters' suicides relieve the viewer's desire to terminate the film. Now, creating an audience response like that is not an easy thing to do, and Haneke did go on to become a brilliant filmmaker, but The Seventh Continent seemed to me a stylish, empty exercise in morbidity.