I'm not always in the mood for Hanake's often deliberately grueling brand of blunt novelistic psychological/metaphorical writing or pretentiously miserable and clinical "beauty has to suffer" observational style, but it felt right to wait this one out and clear up my biggest Palme d'Or-winning blindspot of his in a theater, which ended up being the right setting to really concentrate on some the specific off-putting textures and rhythms of how he translates his strict religious upbringing in Austria to an upsetting 1910s German village period drama. One that plays out a fable-like microcosm/test-run of an authoritarian hierarchy (filled with patriarchal abuse, religious fundamentalism, sexual repression and class-based suffering) that slowly bleeds into a strange and somber reflection on the broader atmosphere of “malice, envy, apathy, and brutality" it helped develop. Quietly meditating on the private domestic households of the village doctor, pastor, baron and steward, whose flaws and corruptions and teachings of power and control via disciplinary abuse trickles down to the rest of the Protestant farming community like a planted seed. Especially their children, who are gradually poisoned by simply watching how their strict and punishing political/social structure is organized and the rotten behaviors it covers up, and shaped by it more than anything the kind schoolteacher can instill in them as he becomes a helpless first-hand witness to the raising of a generation of resentful and manipulative sadists. As the mysterious crimes that confuse and terrify the village begin to escalate, and various acts of vandalism, arson and cruel pranks turn into crucified pets, tortured/molested children, suicidal farmers, etc. it starts to almost feel like watching an ambiguous Austrian arthouse Children of the Corn or an evil dread-including version of a Bergman/Dreyer/Bresson film; every haunting use of narration and still, austere and obscured black-and-white frame loaded with your troubling knowledge as a distant observer of what these kids went on to participate in decades later.

[35mm]