The Piano Teacher

Director: Michael Haneke

2001 / 131min / 35mm

Few actresses have so consistently delved into the darker recesses of female sexuality than Isabelle Huppert, from her early collaborations with Claude Chabrol and Maurice Pialat to Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, but for many this chilly, claustrophobic portrayal of a dangerously repressed, masochistic middle-aged Vienna piano professor who enters into an obsessive relationship with one of her pupils, adapting a 1983 novel by Elfriede Jelinek, is the performance they can’t stop thinking about—with a grimace.