As with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon originally began life as a pilot episode for a television series which was then dropped, and additional filming transformed it into a stand-alone feature length movie. Haneke is no stranger to exploring the dark and violent aspects of humanity, having delved into the disturbing recesses of our minds in his debut movie Benny's Video. With The White Ribbon, this grim aspect of our collective humanity is played out on a grander scale, exploring the hypocrisy and cruelty at the heart of a fictional German village in the years before the emergence of fascism and the outbreak of the Second World War. This is a world where repression results in unchecked sadistic impulses, portrayed with the intellectual rigour of Ingmar Bergman at his most pessimistic.
