Isabelle Huppert gives one of the most startling, complex and layered performances of her career as Professor Erika Kohut, a distinguished piano teacher and scholar.
She is brilliant, demanding, unsmiling and regularly bullies and humiliates her impressionable students, just as her own elderly mother with whom she lives, bullies her. When she develops an amour fou for a young student, Walter (Benoît Magimel), her own paraphilic fetishes emerge as she ‘orchestrates’ their highly destructive affaire.
Haneke’s static camera always feels at a distance and yet the feelings of discomfort he engenders feel strangely alluring.
This brutal, unflinching exploration of abuse and sexual desire is also a masterpiece of psychological storytelling, which will linger long after the credits roll.