The White Ribbon / The White Ribbon is the front-runner for the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and for good reason. It’s cold, calculating and completely unlikable, yet, totally devastating in its absolute unmerciful execution. Suffice to say, it’s the most complex, infuriating film of the year. Of course, this is not surprising considering that it’s written and directed by Michael Haneke, a man who refuses to give his audience an easy ride. The tone is uncompromisingly dead serious, but Haneke has enough control to pull off the superhuman feat of avoiding pretention and opening himself up to ridicule or Bergman-esque parody.

As the movie opens, a doctor rides into his estate on horseback, but is thrown from his ride and injured when his horse buckles from a thin wire stretched between two trees at the entrance to his property. As the villagers figure out who among their ranks would do such a thing, more mysterious, malevolent and life-threatening incidents begin to occur.

Between these strange tragedies, we meet the kaleidoscopic cast of citizens that make up the early 20th century German village, and the horrible things they do to each other. Their simple interactions make the looming intentional crimes seem tame. A pastor interrogates and humiliates his son to admit he masturbates, alluding that the act will cause him to die a horrible death. A young man finds that his father has hung himself in a stable and simply shuts the door and walks away. In the most harrowing and uncomfortable scene, the doctor tells the woman he’s been occasionally sleeping with that he no longer wants her. “You disgust me… You’re ugly, messy, flabby, and have bad breath… Skip acting like a martyr and scram… My God, why don’t you just die?” Keep in mind, he chose to tell her this after she failed to sufficiently arouse him with oral sex. It’s no wonder that the one responsible for the village’s crimes left a note on one of the beaten kid’s bodies saying they are punishing their children for the sins of their parents’ sins.

The kids are no better than the adults. A toddler looks upon a dead woman’s body, her face covered under a doily; he lifts the veil and his expression is a mix of apprehension and fascination. An older boy throws a younger, much smaller one into the river for no good reason at all. A girl kills her father’s parakeet with a pair of scissors.

Although we never see any violence or brutal acts, each scene is fraught with tension. Many of the characters are not named, giving the story are fable-like quality. The proceedings are narrated in voiceover by the schoolteacher, now older and reminiscing; this is the period he met his wife and we see his younger self court the object of his affection; the bashful flirting between the two provides the only sense of mirth. There is no music on the soundtrack and everything is filmed by cinematographer and Oscar nominee Christian Berger in stark, antiseptic black and white, providing an authentic, creepy realism.

Suffice to say this movie is no party at the multiplex; even characters from The Crucible would think Arthur Miller let them off easy. It becomes an endurance test of sorts for the audience and Haneke, true to his form, refuses to provide an easy, conclusion wrapped in a bow. Unlike Shutter Island, all questions won’t be cheaply answered and the last thing Haneke will do is pat himself over the back at his script’s cleverness. Not a single moment in the two and a half hour runtime is wasted or there simply for show.

Keep in mind that the story ends with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, clocking the time period to 1913 and 1914, literally moments before World War I. But The White Ribbon is more than a parable about how mamas let their children grow up to be Nazis. It’s nothing less than a somber study on the birth of evil.

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