Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

danieljfenner It's 1989. As the Cold War was taking its last desperate gasps of air, filled with the debris of that crumbling wall, a demure, isolated and all-too-familiar middle-class family sits at their breakfast table in Austria as they continue to perform their meandering daily activities. Is this a better life? Is this what the Western, free-market promised? Just a bunch of junk they don't need, depressing karaoke television and convenience food? Did this family miss the comfort of Communism? We don't know, but without getting all Fight Club about it, Michael Haneke's debut, The Seventh Continent displays the bourgeois misery that serves as the pilot light of the ensuing self-destruction of Western civilization. With his cold-clinical style using diegetic sound and long takes that challenge our patience, Haneke brings us something more sobering and nihilistic than anything that David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk could brainstorm. What makes this film so effective is the vicarious nature of the narrative. These people did what I did in the last week and will probably do again tomorrow. We dine with them, we shower with them. We see ourselves in them. While they are economically stable, they seem to have lost their souls. In typical Haneke fashion, he dissects the ordinary family and isolates their experiences to capture their emptiness. He brings out the themes that we would see in Funny Games and Time of The Wolf. The emasculated, apathetic father, the mother whose emotions are on the edge, as we see when she is going through the car wash that reminds her of the accident they saw in the rain. It's a Kafka tale with no transformation. Nearly a decade later, the US took a crack at this theme with the Oscar-sweeping American Beauty. With that film, Lester Burnham gave the viewer a glimpse into the emotional failure of the American Dream. Yet Lester took charge and gave himself what he wanted. As he defied the control of his wife and shed responsibility, it became the ultimate Men's Rights battle-cry. And as with other American suburban satires, like Happiness, there is still a degree of mythology. Life can be that bad for some people, but not for every member of one family. It comes off as a sort of misery-porn. But Haneke does not allow the audience to have what it wants. He wants to probe us and make us question our priorities and collective reality. There is no dream. No fantasy, because what their wasted potential as humans is too depressing to think about. No escape. Or maybe there is, but what is the cost of that escape? Without giving too much away, there is a climactic sequence in which the family puts their priorities to the test by destroying their property. What about the record collection? Is that the husband's or the wife's? Is there a feminist subtext behind a woman destroying a man's record collection? And finally, as far as destruction goes, I will say, that the fish tank scene in this film far exceeds the potency of the Martin Riggs "MINEY MO!" from Lethal Weapon 2. .....Also from 1989.....(scratching chin)

Frederick Malouf Maybe this is a film as therapy for suiciders. Everything is just so intentionally bleak. I feel so sorry for the family that did this in real life.If someone needs you, you can't die. If you really want to die, do it in the best environment possible. This could change your mind. If I was ever to do this, I'd go to a beach or something. No doubt that would wake me up and then I'd be hungry and go buy fish and chips, or something.I guess people commit suicide because they are so alone. How can so many people be alone in a world with so much potential for communication? 1: A lot of what is discussed is rubbish. 2: There is little means for expressing oneself with others.Too much processing, at the expense of an outdated economic structure.OKOKOK! Couldn't help the last part, but it is honest.Henneke looks like an enlightened person, really to express these insane, depressing things he shows in his films. I suggest, instead of outlawing Hanneke from his work, change society to something more fruitful so we do not give him the fuel to make these depressing movies. I'd wager he would love that as much as I.:)

Baron Ronan Doyle Der Siebente Kontinent, the first film from the now famed and respected writer/director Michael Haneke, exploring the implications of the mundanity of upper-middle class life, is both fascinating and disturbing.The film is the story of Georg, Anna and Eva, a small family living in an upper middle class world. Georg is working his way up in the professional world, Anna co-owns an opticians with her emotionally volatile brother, and Eva is a somewhat troublesome schoolgirl.As the film begins, we are given an insight into the life of this family, the perfunctory drollness with which they carry out the banal tasks of everyday life mingling with the silence and lack of communication between them to create a portrait of a life not lived. Haneke focuses the camera on the table during breakfast, giving us no view of faces, suggesting that the material things in life like food are more important to this family than each other. The emphasis placed on their cursory interactions forms the basis of Haneke's message, showing us the austerity of these people. The image of Australia is used to represent the titular "seventh continent", the family's desire to reach this idyllic world the driving force of the film. The film relies heavily on silence and long unmoving shots, much of its running time focused on static scenes of the family at breakfast, watching television, and performing other routine tasks. This forms the basis for what we are about to see, the unfolding plot both shocking and thought-provoking.Simplistic in its approach, Der Siebente Kontinent effectively displays the flaws of a materialistic and money driven world, and the consequences these flaws have upon the lives of ordinary people. Owing much to the camera angles and editing, it is an interesting and engaging look at the modern world and its impact on its inhabitants. A powerful debut film, it lays the foundations for the acclaim and success Haneke now enjoys.

forgions This movie is not so bad. I rented it because I was intrigued by the conceptual gloom it promised. But the actions of the family are not committed wholeheartedly, the mother is reluctant to follow through, indicating a hidden normalcy to the characters. The suicide is referenced in voice-over letters and in explanations as to how it "should" be done before it actually is done, (e.g. the father breaking down a shelf and telling his wife, who is drawn into the room and bewildered by the scene, "it is best if we do it systematically"). I felt that it would have been stronger if the family had not referenced it, but had just done it in an organic, fluid and uncompromising manner. When the characters have lines foreshadowing their suicide, it gives it a predictability as banal as the bureaucratic world the family is abandoning. I haven't seen any of Michael Haneke's other movies, but he seems like a very deliberate, intellect-wielding director. Sort of like a contemporary Godard, although he had to break from Godard in order to replace him. I was watching this with a friend, who said, "I feel like he is making a clear-cut argument." I felt the same way. Although I am not opposed to this way of approaching film-making, it detracts from the characters, because they become tools of the director's thesis rather than living, emotion-showing individuals. This movie is not disturbing, it isn't depressing, it's just a point of view, cut and dry. I did like one thing about this movie- the way that it was shot. It has a photographic crispness to it.