Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003)

 

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.

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