Beyond the Multiplex

New on DVD: Evil at the heart of society in "The Films of Michael Haneke"; evil under the sea in "The Call of Cthulhu"
You can find plenty of laborious essays on the Internet decoding the films of Michael Haneke in the light of incomprehensible European social and literary theory. But, honest to Pete, you're better off just watching them. Kino's new box set "The Films of Michael Haneke," covering the German-born, Austrian-raised director's major works from "The Seventh Continent" in 1989 to "The Piano Teacher" in 2001, is its own seductive and treacherous lotusland. It's a must-have item for cinephiles, but beware: Once you enter Haneke's world, it's not easy to get out.

As I wrote to somebody who demanded that I share my private theory about the origin of the mysterious surveillance videotapes in Haneke's 2005 international hit "Caché" (not included here), you have to remember that his movies combine normal storytelling with a certain strain of postmodern provocation. Haneke is such a technical virtuoso, so skilled at camerawork and framing, atmosphere and mood, that it's easy not to see that he's aiming beyond the boundaries of ordinary narrative. He treats his characters with generosity and respect (or at least the ones he takes seriously), but he is also, always, seeking to remind us that we are participants in an artificial, highly ritualized process: the act of watching a film. So the middle-class family members terrorized by an invisible voyeur in "Caché" are characters in a story, but the force tormenting them is, like Augustine's conception of God, not to be found inside their world.

Partway through Haneke's terrifying 1997 "Funny Games," the wisecracking criminal, possibly named Paul, who invades a different bourgeois family's vacation home and subjects them to physical and psychological tortures begins to speak in knowing asides to the camera. When his dimwit accomplice suggests killing off the whole family and moving on to their next enterprise, Paul protests, "But we're not up to feature length yet." Then he turns to the audience and says, "What do you think? Don't you want a full-length movie, with plausible plot developments?"

In an accompanying 2005 interview, Haneke comments ruefully that "Funny Games" -- intended as an indictment of the audience appetite for violence -- has itself become a cult movie among horror fans in English-speaking countries. (I don't know how he hopes to avoid a similar fate for his forthcoming American remake of the film, starring Tim Roth and Naomi Watts.) His other movies don't all possess the same level of overt gamesmanship, but once you understand that he wants you to watch yourself watching his film -- and that the boundary between narrative and "reality," between story and commentary, is highly porous -- they start to make a lot more sense.

I was particularly struck by Haneke's first film after his post-"Funny Games" relocation to France, the 2001 "Code Unknown," which wasn't much seen outside Europe and struck some of his fans as a sellout. (Translation: Nobody gets gruesomely killed.) It's a slithery, fragmentary work that follows the consequences of a random Parisian street encounter as they ripple through several disparate lives across the continent. "Code Unknown" has more of an overt social message than most of Haneke's films, but it also has a powerful psychological undertow; it seeps into your subconscious and ends up every bit as disturbing as "Funny Games."

This set also includes Haneke's excellent 1997 adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Castle" (made for Austrian TV), along with his early study of violence and dissociation, "Benny's Video," and "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance," a study of a Columbine-like massacre that predates Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" by a decade, and outdoes it too.

I have long maintained that Peter Jackson should have bailed on his bloated "King Kong" remake and spent the money on adapting "The Call of Cthulhu," H.P. Lovecraft's demented cult-horror fable from 1926. He never did, but possibly something better happened. A cadre of Lovecraft enthusiasts from Los Angeles cobbled together $50,000 and made the film as if it still were 1926: As a black-and-white silent movie, barely 45 minutes long, featuring intertitles drawn from Lovecraft's text, earnest but never ham-handed overacting and a tremendously imaginative array of cheapo special effects, including a Louisiana swamp made out of papier-mâché and tissue paper, and a sunken oceanic city of horrific dimensions, built from plywood in somebody's backyard.

Director Andrew Leman and writer-producer Sean Branney are authentic Lovecraft fans, who bridge the gap between camp and serious interpretation brilliantly. Their "Call of Cthulhu," culminating with the appearance of the living-dead squid-god himself -- yes, he's a rubber stop-motion miniature, but quite an effective one -- is sometimes funny but never a spoof. The laughs come from the disjuncture between modern movie-watching expectations and the conventions of 1920s melodrama, not from any disrespect for the source material. This is a Lovecraft film with precisely the kind of bottled-up arrested-adolescent ardor that the talented but profoundly silly writer would himself have appreciated, and I can imagine no better tribute. Except to include a sentence in italics in a feeble attempt to convey the sanity-shattering horror of the Great Old Ones and their pending return! Absolutely do not miss the making-of documentary, an inspiring tale of can-do indie spirit that made me want to weep with gratitude. Joe Swanberg and his pals would be proud.

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