The opening sequence of Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf
might promise a relatively conventional society-breakdown film: a family of
four arrives at their weekend cottage to take refuge, finding it already occupied;
within minutes the father is dead and the mother (Isabelle Huppert) and two
children are out on their own, stripped of their supplies. A little while
later, they see a passing train and make their way to a railway station in hope of
finding transport out, and that’s almost as much as ever happens: all the
subsequent scenes are set at or around the station, with limited news of the
outside world, and declining hope of that train ever showing up. It’s a set-up
that might evoke Beckett, its dark ridiculousness increasing in proportion to
the existential stakes, and Haneke very subtly teases us with portents and
possibilities that never go where they might (for example, the station is initially
dominated by a potentially dangerous man called Koslowski who lays down the law
and controls the allocation of supplies, but as others arrive he fades into the
mix; another character seems like a symbol of non-conformity and defiance, but
his efforts end up as failures, stealing a precious goat and ending up
pointlessly killing it; even Huppert’s character barely emerges from the crowd
in the latter stretch, a confrontation with her husband’s killer likewise
coming to nothing). Haneke orchestrates a typically strong, richly ambiguous
finale, fusing elements of supernatural possession and ritual self- destruction
with a comforting (if likely delusionary) assertion of all that was good and
might be again; the final extended shot might belong either to the past or the
future, might be either the expression of a wish or of the extinguishment of
one. Overall it’s one of Haneke’s narrower and more withholding visions, but no
less meticulously rewarding for that.
