Review #288: 'The Seventh Continent' (1989)

A middle-class family, consisting of father Georg (Dieter Berner), mother Anna (Birgit Doll), and young daughter Evi (Leni Tanzer) live out their routine daily lives in apparent discomfort. The film is split into three sections - 1987, 1988, and 1989. The first two years, we are given an insight into their thinking as Anna narrates letters written to her parents. We witness the mundaneness of their lives in scenes showing them eating breakfast, at work, going through a car wash, driving in their car. They are trapped by their repetitive surroundings in an unavoidable consumerist world. The third section sees the parents quitting their jobs, buying power tools, and emptying their bank accounts. They tell people they're going to Australia, only they plan to destroy their home and kill themselves.

Haneke is the master of the cold and the uncomfortable. This was his debut feature, only he seemed to have already mastered this skill. In his later films, we witness brutal animal slaughter in Benny's Video (1992), genital mutilation in The Piano Teacher (2001), and possibly the most shocking suicide ever depicted on film in his masterpiece Hidden (2005). In The Seventh Continent, we know what is coming. It is laid out quite early in the film. When it comes, it is every bit as unpleasant as you would hope it wouldn't be. Haneke doesn't need blood or dramatic music. Instead he just lets us hear the last gargled breaths, taking place off-camera, of someone taken an overdose of pills. Powerful, terrible and profoundly disturbing.

Haneke, in my opinion, is the world's greatest living director. Granted, the likes of Godard and Herzog are still making films, but their heyday was in the 1960's and 70's respectively. Haneke is in his prime, and their is no-one making more skilful films. He based The Seventh Continent on a newspaper article he read about a family that committed suicide in a similar fashion (as we learn over the end credits), and uses it as a commentary on a world obsessed with formality. This is certainly not an enjoyable film, but it is one that will linger with me for a long time, which is similar to the effect Hidden had on me. It will occasionally test your patience (scenes are repeated and their are long periods without dialogue), but its power is undeniable. An assured debut.


Directed by: Michael Haneke
Starring: Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer
Country: Austria

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie