Arno Frisch is an ordinary-looking teenager. He lives with his parents in an apartment decorated in similar shades of grey. He is a member of the school's chorus. He gets in trouble for punching his friend. One day he brings a girl home and kills her with a bolt gun. When his parents find out, they decide to cover it up; it would be a disgrace.
Michael Haneke's movie makes me want to blurt out technical terms like sociopathy, anomie, and so forth to explain what happens. I think Haneke wanted to elicit those terms to toss them aside for simpler, clearer motivations: boredom, evil, lack of conscience. In many ways he takes apart Werner Herzog's views of evil in glorious shots and reduces it to something small, grey, and blankly unaware: people living in a society where nothing is expected of them except to not make a fuss, and not get caught. Herzog's evils, carried through successfully, will yield huge rewards. Haneke's evils have no reward, people just do them because they're evil. There's no sense of consequentialism, no defense that the ends justify the means.
Michael Haneke's movie makes me want to blurt out technical terms like sociopathy, anomie, and so forth to explain what happens. I think Haneke wanted to elicit those terms to toss them aside for simpler, clearer motivations: boredom, evil, lack of conscience. In many ways he takes apart Werner Herzog's views of evil in glorious shots and reduces it to something small, grey, and blankly unaware: people living in a society where nothing is expected of them except to not make a fuss, and not get caught. Herzog's evils, carried through successfully, will yield huge rewards. Haneke's evils have no reward, people just do them because they're evil. There's no sense of consequentialism, no defense that the ends justify the means.