Paedophile in disguise

Rating: 7/10 (16 December 2009)

Michael Haneke's new film is a mystery "whodunit" without a tiresome detective Poirot summing up the situation and announcing his conclusion at the end. This can be an unsatisfying experience for the spectator, who may feel being conned for over two hours watching a drama without ending. It certainly is a very intriguing film. Strange that most comments in this forum like to associate this story to the genesis of Nazism, this seems to me far-fetched. The story unfolds in a small village in Germany just before WWI on the events involving children – who are aplenty in the film (it seems that every family in this small village has at least 8 children, except the doctor whose wife died after the birth of his second child). The mysterious occurrences in the village all seem to have appearances of divine retribution for the "sins" of the victims either in their present or their past lives.
I am not convinced that this signifies the birth of the Nazism. Some commentators in this forum seem to complicate the story by reading too much between the lines and missing the obvious fact. I am surprised that no one made any allusion to the sexual deviance and paedophile behaviour of the Pastor in the film. Watch: instead of being enraged by the incest between the doctor and his daughter, the Pastor was secretly jealous. His apparent severity towards his own children in matters of sexual nature was his deliberate act to disguise his sexual frustration. When the teacher mentioned that the midwife had found out the perpetrator behind the torture of two children, the Pastor was visibly shaken, and immediately closed the windows to prevent the leaking of the news to the outside world. Has no one ever thought that this is a story about a sexually frustrated paedophile in the guise of a Pastor?