In Vienna, a writer escapes the confines of her comfortable life with her companion and the pressures of her career by beginning an affair with another man, who is passionate yet aloof. As her love becomes an obsession, the writer is haunted by visions of a violent older man, perhaps her father.

Isabelle Huppert is a blazing incarnation of cracked feminine subjectivity in this frenzied, brilliant adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s modernist novel. In Werner Schroeter’s direction and Elfi Mikesch’s cinematography, writerly agony and the anguish of a love triangle come to incandescent light.