Directed by Michael Haneke
Suffering is a speciality of Austrian director Michael Haneke, both among his characters and in his audiences.  It's always been hard to come through one of his films unscathed, unchallenged, and still feeling the world is a place where it's possible to be happy. His is a vision of human life as something harsh, threatened and irremediably flawed, where monstrous retribution lies in wait, a view rather like that of the strict Protestant patriarchy presented here. Unease seeps off the screen in this, possibly his most beautiful and troubling film yet.

The tight community of the German village which is the setting is a society bound both by its semi-feudal nature, where most livelihoods are controlled by the landowner, and by its harsh Lutheran beliefs, orchestrated by the pastor. At one end of the little village is the Baron's mansion, and in the middle the bleak, almost windowless bulk of the church rises above the surrounding houses.  ‘God is a fortress', as the chorale which we hear the children singing later inside it. But a fortress against what? Through all the levels of society,  including the family of the pastor himself, no spirit is free. When terrible things start to happen - from the doctor being badly hurt when his horse is tripped, to children being tortured, it seems like an emanation of evil from the place itself.
A narrator, the voice in old age of the young village schoolmaster, takes us into his confidence at the beginning and tells us that what happened in the village may have had some bearing on what happened later in his country. The German subtitle of the film, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (A German Children's Story), goes untranslated into other languages onscreen, says Haneke, because ‘I didn't want other nations to think of it as a specifically German problem'.  and while it sets the action into a specific historical context, i.e. a generation of children most of whom will grow up to embrace, or at least to accept, fascism,  this is a universal story of  the dangers of repression and warped love.
The narrator is unreliable, because more than half of what the film shows us cannot have been seen by him. It happens behind closed doors, in the place that should be safe and happy, that most suspect place of Haneke's, the heart of the family. Here, only the camera is narrator, and what we see is often open to conjecture.
The white ribbon is a symbol of purity tied to the arm or the hair of a ‘sinful' child to remind them to be good, paradoxically becoming a mark of their sinfulness.  Thus their fundamentalist Protestantism labels individuals as sinners, and the harsh physical and mental discipline marks and spoils them. Like the children in Village of the Damned or The Turn of the Screw, they are polite and biddable in the face of adults, but unknowable and disquieting at other times. Twice they appear as menacing shapes outside a door, reminiscent of the youths in Funny Games. Houses are never as safe as they seem with Haneke.
The small children at least are innocent - and what superb performances Haneke coaxes out of the young actors. Two scenes in particular stand out- one where through quiet and naturalistic questioning with his sister we see a little boy learning for the first time about mortality, and another where the same child is distressed in the night and wanders through the dark house, to open a door on light and, maybe, something unspeakable in the bright glare within.  Innocence puzzled and destroyed - though whether by the actions of adults or by something intrinsic in the human condition, is in doubt.  The ethereally beautiful sound of the church chorales, sung by the innocent/sinister/damaged children, makes one distrust even beauty. 

But perhaps the most surprising thing about this magnificently painful film is that we do see one happy man, an outsider, the young teacher, in a likeable and tender relationship with the shy nanny from the big house. Elsewhere no relations are unsullied, no affection allowed to flourish, but here at least is maybe the possibility of a life lived happily. In its austere black and white, shots painstakingly framed, camera lingering on inscrutable faces, the film's incredibly beautiful - Bresson's spare, textured surfaces come to mind . There is no soundtrack other than actual sounds which are intrinsic to the action on screen, a way that Haneke has of immersing you in his world - you almost feel yourself leaning forward and holding your breath to concentrate.
In the final shots we see them settling in their pews preparing for all that the twentieth century will bring,  the children ranged above like soon-to-be-avenging angels, a poor, doomed churchload of people looking out at us,  floating off into history.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 14 November 2009