The White Ribbon
Genre: Drama
Director: Michael Haneke
Stars: Christian Friedel
Rating: ****
Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner from the 2009 Cannes fest plays like a particularly disturbing episode of The Twilight Zone. Set in a rural Protestant village in Germany on the cusp of World War I, it tracks the rise of fascism in the slow disintegration of social values. Acts of violence and vandalism seem at first to be random, but begin to take on the shape of retribution; Filmed in glorious monochrome and with Haneke’s keen sense of the sins of man.
