REVIEW: 'White Ribbon' looks like period piece, but draws from classic sci-fi

GRADE: A

The WHITE RIBBON

Cast: Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Michael Kranz, Burghart Klaussner

Director: Michael Haneke

Theater: Kimball’s

Rated: R (for some disturbing content involving violence and sexuality)

Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes

Although a period piece set in a small, pre-World War I German township, “The White Ribbon” throbs with a spectral connection to a 1960 science fiction film that, were I to name it, would surely ruin this film’s dark, ambiguous surprise.

Director Michael Haneke (“Caché,” “Funny Games”) is known as a filmmaker who courts controversy, turning a lot of people off in the process. I am not one of them. I like his outlandish examinations of media, violence and social disorder.

He is up to his usual tricks here, and though we see few things more violent than a slap across the face, “The White Ribbon,” disguised as a beautiful and affecting art-house film, is actually a vicious attack on the sort of fascism that ripped the 20th century in two.

Something’s not right in the village. A wire stretched across a road trips a horse, throwing its rider, the town doctor, to the ground with bone-crushing force.

A farmer’s wife is killed in a mysterious mill accident. A barn catches fire in the middle of the night and burns to the ground. A young child is tortured and maimed. What begins as a series of random accidents suddenly takes on the force of malevolent evil. Someone is behind the attacks and as the disturbing events escalate, the villagers cannot help but begin suspecting their neighbors.

We suspect, too, though we are never given any clues.

This is not about evidence and proof; it is about the metastasizing, putrid feeling in the pit of your stomach that senses primal evil where there should be only purity and innocence.

The community has never experienced anything like this. For generations it has run smoothly, orderly, precisely, as a good German society should. Everyone knows their place, from the baron who owns the land on which most of the village’s poor farmers work, to the minister, schoolteacher and servants. We see children often, but rarely hear their laughter.

Even in good times, this is not a particularly happy place. This is an authoritarian society, led by imperious and strict fathers who enforce their will through suffocating intimidation, and who see God, their model, as a wrathful Old Testament dictator obsessed with morality and punishing iniquity.

They use faith as a weapon to bludgeon their wives and children and force everyone to wonder if the village’s troubles are not some sort of punishment for sin. They are child abusers of the highest order, which is to say, for their time, they were probably fairly typical.

Nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, “The White Ribbon” channels the visual, psychological and religious austerity of Ingmar Bergman. How can a film this antiseptic and sterile also be this rich and fertile? Shot in black and white, there is extraordinary beauty and texture here.

But for all its placid exterior, “The White Ribbon” roils with subtext and metaphor. It reveals the seeds of Nazism, though its gaze is almost certainly wider, a greater commentary on the manner in which wickedness, done in the name of righteousness, will always turn to devour that which gave it birth. And then it spreads. It is about the paradoxical way that best intentions turn sour, then poisonous, the lengths we will go to to remain safe, and the preservation of freedom amid totalitarian order.

What Haneke does is stage these ideals not in some high-minded, politically attuned parable as most might be tempted to do, but in the one place that makes the most sense: in ordinary people like you and me.