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.

Der Siebente Kontinent, the first film from the now famed and respected writer/director Michael Haneke, exploring the implications of the mundanity of upper-middle class life, is both fascinating and disturbing.The film is the story of Georg, Anna and Eva, a small family living in an upper middle class world. Georg is working his way up in the professional world, Anna co-owns an opticians with her emotionally volatile brother, and Eva is a somewhat troublesome schoolgirl.As the film begins, we are given an insight into the life of this family, the perfunctory drollness with which they carry out the banal tasks of everyday life mingling with the silence and lack of communication between them to create a portrait of a life not lived. Haneke focuses the camera on the table during breakfast, giving us no view of faces, suggesting that the material things in life like food are more important to this family than each other. The emphasis placed on their cursory interactions forms the basis of Haneke's message, showing us the austerity of these people. The image of Australia is used to represent the titular "seventh continent", the family's desire to reach this idyllic world the driving force of the film. The film relies heavily on silence and long unmoving shots, much of its running time focused on static scenes of the family at breakfast, watching television, and performing other routine tasks. This forms the basis for what we are about to see, the unfolding plot both shocking and thought-provoking.Simplistic in its approach, Der Siebente Kontinent effectively displays the flaws of a materialistic and money driven world, and the consequences these flaws have upon the lives of ordinary people. Owing much to the camera angles and editing, it is an interesting and engaging look at the modern world and its impact on its inhabitants. A powerful debut film, it lays the foundations for the acclaim and success Haneke now enjoys.

The seventh continent at the centre of this bleak tale of suburban dysfunction is as vague and enigmatic as the film itself. Are we supposed to believe that the geographical state noted in the title is the rugged, ethereal landscape glimpsed fleetingly throughout key moments of the film, or is it in fact a much higher state of being that can only truly be achieved by purging yourself of the trappings of twentieth century life? The need for transcendence is central throughout The Seventh Continent (1989), the first feature film from Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke, who has subsequently gone on to re-examine this very same theme in his following films - 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), The Piano Teacher (2001) and Hidden (2005) - by continually probing the very boundaries of human nature and the personal and/or social factors that can drive an individual to the point of complete, psychological transcendence. If you are at all familiar with Haneke's work you will be partially aware of what to expect from the film in question, with The Seventh Continent presenting us with a deep, hypnotic and highly clinical examination of the break-down in communication between members of a middle-class Austrian family, and the desire they have to transcend the drab, soulless grind of their everyday existence and arrive at that mythical place so central to the title.Even here, with his first film for cinema, Haneke's iconic style and attention to detail is fully-formed, with the same stylistic flourishes found in his recent film, the highly acclaimed Hidden, already presented in the stark, antiseptic presentation of the world created here. The direction of the film is intended to present to us the emptiness and tedium central to the lives of its characters, by giving us scenes that play out in long, unbroken takes lasting anywhere between five to ten minutes, with the camera often locked off and immobile in order to further emphasise the idea of clinical examination. In this respect, the film is less about telling a story and presenting emotions in a manner that we might expect from cinema, but instead feeling more like a science experiment, with Haneke as the biology professor inviting us to take a look through the lens of the microscope. In keeping with this idea, the way in which the drama unfolds and is presented is again drawing heavily on the director's desire to create a mood for the audience that in some way mirrors that of the characters depicted on screen. So, the slow pace, deliberately minimal use of editing and the constant repetition of scenes, actions and events all help to create that same sense of tedium and lifeless banality in order to create a reaction or even a sense of empathy from those of us watching this very ordinary family spiral so terribly out of control.These themes are further reinforced with the film's near iconic opening shot; a locked off, low-angle perspective of a family saloon moving slowly through a service station car wash. The shot, presented in real-time, lasts somewhere between five or six minutes, but on our first exposure to the film, feels much, much longer. Although it will undoubtedly infuriate some, it establishes the style and pace of the film perfectly; whilst also creating something of an atmosphere of empty, soulless routine. Why wash the car when it will only get dirty again? Later in the film the shot will be repeated within context to further illustrate this point. From here we cut to a montage of cold, clinically arranged images of domestic cleansing; toilets, shower-heads, sinks, plug-holes, toothbrushes, etc. It's almost ten minutes before we even see a character's face or find any kind of meaningful exchange of dialog, with Haneke instead presenting the ideas of routine, conformity, cleansing and facade. The notion of cleansing, both literally in this instance, and spiritually as the film progresses, is an important theme, with the family effectively cleansing themselves from society; stripping away every layer of the superficial and eventually taking the final leap of faith into the unknown.Even here, as the family take their house apart piece by piece and destroy their belongings in order to free themselves from the shackles of routine and social responsibility, we have the action presented as a series of hypnotic, gruelling and repetitive montages that stress the weight of effort required to even escape the horrors of the mundane. Admittedly, I could be reading this the wrong way, but to me the implication is clear; that the family - for one reason or another - have simply ceased to exist. Even before the film begins they have been consumed by life and are now numbed to its pleasures, no matter how few and far between. As a result, many will find these characters hard to like and even harder to empathise with, particularly in the selfishness regarding their child. In one of the most moving scenes, Haneke drops his guard, and for the first time allows his polemic to be overtaken by emotion; as the family sit motionless on the couch, the television set flickering in the dark, with Jennifer Rush singing her anthemic hit The Power of Love as their house lies in ruins, the little girl drinks her milk and softly proclaims "its bitter!". The Seventh Continent is not as easy film to watch; nor to appreciate on any immediate, emotional level. Like much of Haneke's work it requires an enormous amount of thought and effort on the part of the audience to really think about and deconstruct what it is that he is attempting to convey, and only then are we able to truly understand and appreciate what the film is really about.

"The Seventh Continent" is as disturbing as any Haneke's film can get, and being confined to a family with almost no other outside interactions makes this story even more upsetting.Living a routine life of deathly stillness, the family portrayed in this film is unsurprisingly typical in our modern society where people hardly pay attention to fundamental things and senses. They got up at 6 a.m.; they had milk and oats for breakfast; they wore and polished their shoes; they had their car washed...Haneke was "considerate" enough to show us their daily actions with so incredibly rich details that you almost felt like a member of the family.As Haneke said, they are actually not living --- they just simply went through motions.It's horrible how you got so used to the things always around you that you just ignore them --- even they're your families.I thought they finally realized the problem...Well they did actually. However, it was just so late that they figured out a crazy way to achieve liberation.Shocked to the core as I was, I thanked this story to hold me up by the violent actions as soon as I was about to relate this family to mine --- No surprises or inspirations but routines and trivialities is all the similarity we can afford to share with this extreme family.It's always more comfortable to be unmoral among disputes than be perceptive surrounded by flaws. **(spoiler)I wonder if at that night they didn't drive by the accident thus didn't see the bodies, would the wife trigger their self-consciousness...** Either way is a tragedy anyway.Let this real story be a lesson to all of us who forgot how to live.