Bewildered and lost in mayhem

The German-born director Michael Haneke is adept at manipulating traditional narrative responses to upset and challenge audience expectations. Funny Games (1997) is probably his most successful effort, though The Piano Teacher (2001) gathered more attention.

Here, in a similar opening to Funny Games, a bourgeois urban family arrive at their country cottage to find it occupied by armed squatters. A gun goes off and the husband lies dead, leaving Anne (Isabelle Huppert) and her young children at the mercy of a strangely hostile (and spookily empty) countryside.

As they struggle to find shelter, food and assistance they are met with fear and indifference. "You don't know what's going on? Why didn't you stay in town?" says her nearest neighbour before shutting the door in their faces.

Signs of some nameless catastrophe gradually emerge; a blazing-bonfire of cattle, dead sheep along the road, an opaque fog that makes passage almost as difficult as in the impenetrable dark of night. Plague? Nuclear fallout? Biological warfare?

Matters improve marginally when they arrive at a station waiting room stuffed with people, and reminiscent of a refugee camp. They stay and wait for a train that may or may not come, and may or may not convey them to safety. During their wait, social breakdown brings a return to primitive values: strangers and foreigners are feared, the first to be accused of malfeasance.

Haneke withholds as much information from the viewer as he does from the characters. We are as bewildered and lost as they are. But he has a surprise in store. Having led us to believe that a sickening human sacrifice is imminent, he delivers his most optimistic conclusion to date.

This doesn't make it a feelgood movie, but it is a remarkable and enlightening denouement and a moving statement on the resilience and fundamental decency of the human spirit.

Who would have thought the old misanthrope had so much hope in him?

Time Of The Wolf (Le Temps Du Loup)
Cert: 15