Intelligent, hard-hitting, nightmarish family drama that's based on a true story and told in a repetitive clinical style that reflects the subjects' anomie.

Confirms -- through its narrow portrait of life as unrelentingly bleak -- its own gloomy cynicism.

Michael Haneke could be cinema's Debbie Downer, if only he had any sense of humor.

Haneke basically tortures the viewer to the point of almost unbearable, first focusing his film (based on real life events) on the dull, bureaucratic and apathetic routine of a modern family and then moving to the excruciatingly detailed, step-by-step preparation of a horrific incident.

Bruising and depressing, the Seventh Continent builds and builds to a shattering climax with a sense of monotony that few have ever achieved. Its power lies in its ambitious decision to show us what has happend and let us draw our own conclusions, or make up our own reasons for why it went the way it did.