[Curious Watchlist: 17 of 50](https://letterboxd.com/inastrangeway/list/curious-watchlist-2025/)
I'll be honest, this wasn't at all what I was expecting. For some reason, for years I've had it in my head that this film would be a film about the chain reaction of events stemming from a single, innocuous moment. I guess I was teased by the fact that this is literally how the plot is described.
Because of that, I probably went into this wrong, and as the film went on, I felt more and more disillusioned with the abrasive contrast between my expectations of the film, and what the film actually is. In reality, the film is a slow, disjointed series of vignettes depicting small moments in all of the characters lives. Some of these are detached and meaningless, such as watching a tractor mowing the crops (is that what it's called? Mowing? Who knows?) and another depicts Anne being accosted by some hooligans on a subway train and subsequently spat on after being harrassed for 10 minutes. The disparity between the vignettes is interesting, and all sorts of shades of the human condition are explored, from child abuse to socioeconomic judgement.
What's central to all of this is the position of observation and responsibility - in so many of these moments, there's a character who is faced with the ability to intervene or let it pass. As the audience, we too are complicit, watching and wondering what we would do in any given situation.
But ultimately, this is an intentionally fragmented tapestry of moments that are as connected or disconnected as we choose them to be. Haneke opens the film with a group of deaf kids playing charades: one girl stands at the front of the class and desperately tries to convey her chosen meaning to the rest. At first, she giggles as the kids fails to get it right, but soon her face drops. They never get it right. Perhaps that's us, and Haneke was letting us know from the start that it would be fruitless to try to understand what you're about to see, and instead it's about just taking each moment for what they are. Every moment we live is connected to every other moment, because they are all part of the one chronology - and yet they're not connected at all, and trying to find the web that weaves them is as fruitless as trying to understand the why. It's a theme common in Haneke's work, and it's perhaps presented at its most oblique here.
I will need to both stew on this and also revisit it again now that I have a better understanding of what the film even is. I enjoyed it, but felt myself needing to tether to the expectation more than I perahps would have if I went in completely blind. Oh well.
