A village in Protestant northern Germany. 1913-1914. On the eve of World War I. The story of the children and teenagers of a choir run by the village schoolteacher, and their families: the baron, the steward, the pastor, the doctor, the midwife, the tenant farmers. Strange accidents occur and gradually take on the character of a punishment ritual. Who is behind it all? The village schoolteacher observes, investigates and little by little discovers the incredible truth. Are we being asked to consider whether these events heralded something that would explode years later with the rise of Nazi Germany? Did these events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed?
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Reviews
The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
"Michael Haneke’s Golden Palm-winning masterwork The White Ribbon – a film of subtle savagery and mordantly encompassing vision – is rude about provincial life, rude about the causes and effects of provincial life."
11/11/2009
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"In the end, there is no solution to the mystery; it could be that history and human agency are unknowable, untreatable, or it could be that the Nazi generation grew up with unexpired resentment and the frustration of not getting a solution – and the director wishes us to hear the malign echoes of that word. This is a profoundly disquieting movie, superbly acted and directed. Its sinister riddle glitters more fiercely each time I watch it."
12/11/2009
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The Observer
Philip French
"The White Ribbon is a spellbinding movie, as exciting as a thriller, which, indeed, it resembles. Among other things, it's about an unjust social system yoked to a repressive society that is morally and physically disintegrating, though no one's prepared to confront it."
15/11/2009
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The Spectator
Deborah Ross
"Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which won the Palm d’Or in Cannes, is coldly manipulative and, in a way, probably quite facile but, God, it is good. It is so powerfully intriguing that, for 143 minutes, I did not shift in my seat, yawn, sigh, strain to read my watch or even drift into thinking what we might have for dinner (I’d already decided, anyhow; chops)."
11/11/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Sukhdev Sandhu
"However, to argue, as many writers have, that The White Ribbon is an allegory of incipient Nazism seems a little delimiting. I see it as a very contemporary story, one that could apply to any number of Middle Eastern countries, about the ways, at once trivial, mysterious and infinitely important, that terror creeps up on a state. And how easily a potentially righteous, even revolutionary violence can eat its own people."
12/11/2009
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Time Out
Dave Calhoun
"As a thriller, this is much more muted and subtle than ‘Hidden’. The result is that there’s more space for Haneke – and us – to consider the behaviour of his characters and the relationships between them. It’s his least aggressive and most mature film – a masterpiece from a director who is increasingly making a habit of them."
12/11/2009
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Variety
Todd McCarthy
"Immaculately crafted in beautiful black-and-white and entirely absorbing through its longish running time, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” nonetheless proves a difficult film to entirely embrace. Stressing, as usual, a conspicuously dim view of the world, the Austrian writer-director here spins a mysterious story about a series of untoward events in a rural village in pre-World War I Germany to advance the notion that malice is arguably the dominant human trait."
20/05/2009
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Sight & Sound
Catherine Wheatley
"The White Ribbon steps back from the aggression towards the audience that has often characterised Haneke's later work. Gone is the direct audience address of Funny Games; gone the shock tactics of Hidden and the provocative explicitness of The Piano Teacher. Gone too is the self-reflexive and self-regarding fascination with film-viewing and its variants that marked Benny's Video; in fact, The White Ribbon is the first of Haneke's cinematic releases not to feature a television screen somewhere in its midst."
16/02/2010
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Empire Magazine
Damon Wise
"Though it poses as a thriller, The White Ribbon is nothing of the sort. It’s a film about climates of violence, and by taking World War I Germany as its primary location, it asks fascinating questions about that very troubled country. Where was Nazism really born — was it in the genes, was it in society, or was it simply a blip, a tragic, Fortean freak of nature? For once, Haneke doesn’t force the issues he raises, and his poetic, haunting essay is all the better for it."
16/02/2010
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
"So Haneke is not holding up a whole generation to opprobrium; he is never so unambiguous. The White Ribbon remains open-ended, and thus a little frustrating. We have no conclusive proof of the evildoers' identities, however strong are suspicions may be. This cool-headed, watchful film simply invites us to observe, to imagine, to make up our own minds. That's another way of saying it treats its audience as grown-ups."
12/11/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
"If, ultimately, I find The White Ribbon hard to embrace with undiluted enthusiasm, it's because of its very mastery, which can make Haneke's films feel as airless as the worlds he depicts. His severity and formal perfectionism are at once Olympian and oddly old-fashioned: for a director often considered something of an avant-gardist, Haneke's artistic confidence and philosophical authority make him something like the Tolstoy of contemporary art cinema."
15/11/2009
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The Times
Wendy Ide
"Michael Haneke’s most troubling and fascinating film since Hidden."
14/11/2009
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Channel 4 Film
Anton Bitel
"As an anatomisation of the insular envy, malice and brutality that would lead to the rise of Nazism, The White Ribbon is clinically precise - but also just a little dull."
16/02/2010
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"Why do so many white, middle-class European film fans love the writer/director Michael Haneke and his tales of affluent lives infected with guilt and battered by violence? He seems to excite their moral masochism and arouse their hidden anxieties — tickling their sense of post-imperial guilt with films such as Hidden, or their fears of youth with Benny’s Video and Funny Games. While middle England has the Daily Mail, art-house audiences have Haneke to scare them with tales of a world gone to the dogs."
15/11/2009
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
"Still, I couldn't help thinking it would make the world's most depressing musical, with numbers such as I've Decided To Hang Myself In The Barn, Someone Has Murdered The Budgie, Let's Torture The Weakling, You Disgust Me So Much I Want You To Die, What Are You Doing To Me Daddy, We're So Sexually Repressed We're Going To Become Nazis, and Let's Torture The Weakling, Reprise."
13/11/2009
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