This is the third Haneke film I've seen (Funny Games and Cache being the others), and it is pretty obvious to me that it is the first one he made. The cinematography and atmosphere were there, but the story and character development were not. Bleak, emotionally dead people (seriously some of the lamest, unsympathetic characters I have ever seen) commit suicide because the boring, repetitive motions of their daily lives that the director chooses to show us are boring and repetitive. All allusions and foreshadowing are heavy handed, and Haneke uses extended black screen cuts repeatedly to slow the pace even further. All of this leads to a film that bores the viewer to the point where the characters' suicides relieve the viewer's desire to terminate the film. Now, creating an audience response like that is not an easy thing to do, and Haneke did go on to become a brilliant filmmaker, but The Seventh Continent seemed to me a stylish, empty exercise in morbidity.