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The Seventh Continent(Der siebente Kontinent)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Austria
·
1989

1h 47m

Director Michael Haneke
Starring Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer, Silvia Fenz

Genre Drama

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This haunting tale chronicles three years in the lives of a middle-class Austrian family. They live mundane and repetitive lives, but during the third year, Georg, Anna, and their daughter, Eva, decide “to leave,” ostensibly to move to Australia — but they follow through on much more sinister plans.

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WHAT ARE CRITICS SAYING?

50

Slant Magazine by

By concentration exclusively on humanity’s negativism, Haneke proves to be as damagingly reductive of life’s possibilities as the emotional malaise he sets out to expose.
60

The New York Times by Caryn James

The Seventh Continent is one of the most stylish films in this year's New Directors/New Films series. With its fragmented pattern of beautifully composed and repeated images from middle-class life, it rejuvenates a 1960's style that would seem to be exhausted by now. But the Austrian writer and director Michael Haneke pulls viewers through a good portion of the film on the sheer strength of his visual flair, avoiding the classic trap of how to create a film about boredom that is not boring.
100

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

The Seventh Continent is a calm chronicle of hell, a clinical look at how commonplace people can erupt into despair or violence. Bleak, cool, beautifully controlled, liberatingly intelligent, it chills our hearts as it opens our minds. And it establishes Haneke as one of the more remarkable young contemporary filmmakers.
100

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

A chilling and utterly brilliant film whose final, excoriating sequence is frankly sufficient on its own to justify the genius tag.
100

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

The Seventh Continent deals with the deterioration of an average middle-class family by focusing obsessively on mundane life details. As images and actions start repeating themselves, it becomes clear to the family (and to us) that their lives are little more than a collection of routines, without joy or meaning. The conclusion they reach is better left as a surprise, but suffice to say, the third act shifts gears completely.

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