Austrian director Michael Haneke's first film is a work of staggering banality. Once again, wearily wheeled out for ritual condemnation, is the European art house crowd's favorite, all purpose villain, the bourgeoisie. Like the pencil thin moustachioed banker in a Western or a monocled "Ve hef ways of making you talk!" Gestapo guy in a WW2 flic, this benighted middle class family, whose unforgivable crime seems to consist in their being middle rather than upper or lower class, is denied all and any vestiges of humanity, originality, or perception, as is this film. As for its "pacing", so much admired by some of my IMDB colleagues below as well as TCM's Alicia Malone, it consists of boring one to death in the first forty five minutes and taking a dump on us the second. Cinematography's good, though. Solid C.
Review of The Seventh Continent
