Time Of The Wolf

Rating R Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Isabelle Huppert, Maurice Benichou, Hakim Taleb, Lucas Biscombe, Patrice Chereau Directed by Michael Haneke Publisher Palm Pictures External Links Palm Pictures

One of the least commercial filmmakers around, Austrian Michael Haneke has gotten his share of accolades, film festival slots and even an occasional commercial release for his almost unremittingly grim and nihilistic studies of the worst human behavior, including his debut film about a normal family's preparations for mass suicide, The Seventh Continent, and his Brechtian study of a domino effect of events causing a chain reaction of death and mayhem, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.

Haneke's most recent disturbing exploration, The Piano Teacher, may have been the art-house breakthrough he needed, since his latest, the chillingly apocalyptic Time of the Wolf, not only was distributed in the States but arrives on DVD from Palm Pictures.

Haneke's films are usually in-your-face tracts that cause audiences to squirm in their seats, when they don't actually get up and walk out. His best film, Benny's Video, was shown at the 1992 New York Film Festival and has rarely been seen since; his own version of Natural Born Killers, called Funny Games, was released several years ago, as did 2000's Code Unknown (with Juliette Binoche) and The Piano Teacher, starring Isabelle Huppert in a superbly detailed and truly scary performance.

Haneke has cast Huppert again in Time of the Wolf, a genuinely creepy thriller as audacious as it is calculated in its attempt to further unnerve audiences already shaken by recent terrorist events around the globe.

In an unspecified time and place (read "here and now"), an unknown cataclysm has occurred, reducing what remains of humanity to lawlessness. Haneke demonstrates how easy it is for civilized people to return to their basest survival instincts: hierarchical behavior that culminates in protection of 'turf' and, eventually, cold-blooded murder.

There are many frightening episodes in Time of the Wolf, and Haneke's decision to shoot much of the movie in the pitchest black ever seen - or not seen, that should be - on celluloid only adds to the thorough unease with which we watch events unfold. (Haneke has learned well the lesson of the otherwise risible Blair Witch Project: nighttime is scary.)

As often in Haneke's movies, the characters are only ciphers, mere pawns put through their merciless paces by their manipulator-director, but that doesn't detract from the true sense of creepiness throughout Time of the Wolf. As usual, a Haneke film is - for better or for worse - like nothing else you will see.