The Best Horror Film of 2009

Rating: 10/10 (19 October 2010)

Michael Haneke's super creepy and unsettling film about a small German village in the days leading up to World War I is the best horror movie I've seen in a long time.
Things are deeply wrong in this particular village, though they're wrong in ways that are hard to define and which no one will admit. We're introduced to a hard-core patriarchal culture in which men dominate women and children in whatever ways they choose and in which violence and brutality are so seamlessly woven into the fabric of the society they're not even worth commenting on. But the children are watching and learning, and when random, strange and cruel incidents start occurring, it's the children who are most suspect.
I don't think Haneke's point is that child abuse led to the rise of Nazism. Of course it's significant that this film is set when it is, and yes, the children in it would be the right age to become the Nazis of the future. But I think Haneke was interested in broader themes and means for his film to be an investigation of how the atrocities of a people at one isolated point in time are the product of a complicated and dysfunctional past. In this particular case, the result of an unhealthy German culture led to the development of Fascism and Nazism. But apply the same scrutiny to other cultures at other points in history (yes, even to the America of today) and watch the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet.
Grade: A+