With his first feature film, Michael Haneke immediately made a great impression on the international film world. The moving story of an average middle-class family which resorts to collective suicide was portrayed step by step with frightening care. Haneke’s craftsmanship is cool, precise and as meticulous as a surgeon.The family comprises the successful engineer Georg, his wife Anna, who works as an optician and their school-going daughter Eva. Family life runs like clockwork and Haneke demonstrates how the mechanism works with a series of close-ups. It looks like an exemplary and possibly even a happy family in anprosperous world, which is however stone cold. The mechanism and the chilling outside world become more and more oppressive as the film progresses. The absurd and unexplained death they choose acquires a character of inevitability.The tight form and the inevitability of the drama has already ensured that Der siebente Kontinent is compared with the work of Bresson.
