Critics reviews

There's a scene in [the film], shot in a single immobile take, where a poor man comes to look at the corpse of his wife, who's just been killed in a sawmill accident. Her upper body is blocked out of view. The man, his head held low, approaches the bed she's been laid on and, in a moment of unknowable misery, becomes obscured. It's at this moment that Haneke relinquishes the aforementioned privilege and it becomes clear that THE WHITE RIBBON is the most openly empathetic film he's ever made.

Haneke's genius is to embed these possibilities in films rooted in the daily lives of ordinary people. He denies us the simple solutions of most films, in which everything is settled by the violent victory of one side. His films are like parables, teaching that bad things sometimes happen simply because they . . . happen.

[The White Ribbon] is masterly filmmaking... [and] for all its severity, is fundamentally humane.

Shot with dry discipline in striking black and white, the deliberately paced, consistently unnerving film invites viewers into every corner of its town, from its stately manor to its humblest abode, finding in each an air of unease and discontentment.

The masterfully oblique sins-of-the-father mystery Haneke used for Benny's Video and Caché goes awry here: providing too much evidence of the children's complicity, the free-floating threat deflates; leaving too much of the adults' indiscretions flagrantly out in the open, questions of motivation are met with pat answers; in demonstrating how familial and societal institutions instill repression and evade responsibility,

“The White Ribbon” is a whodunit that offers a philosophically and aesthetically unsatisfying answer: everyone. Which is also to say: no one... [The film] is offered to its grateful, masochistic audience in a punitive and yet oddly forgiving spirit, as a reminder of just how awful we are and how much worse we used to be.

No one's idea of a cinematic cuddle-bunny, Haneke is as much strategist as filmmaker and more pedagogue than visionary. The White Ribbon is certainly the most beautiful movie he has made—a sort of triumphantly willed Meisterwerk. His use of narrative uncertainty, resembling those in the unsolved mystery at the heart of Caché, may be standard-issue, but there's no denying The White Ribbon's seriousness and unity.

[An] unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film... [with] chilling brilliance and icy exactitude... [The White Ribbon] is a profoundly disquieting movie, superbly acted and directed. Its sinister riddle glitters more fiercely each time I watch it.

With The White Ribbon, [Haneke] has out-done himself and produced the best film of his career, a tightly-wound, fully-fleshed and thoroughly mesmerizing drama.

As a thriller, [The White Ribbon] is much more muted and subtle than ‘Hidden’. The result is that there’s more space for Haneke – and us – to consider the behaviour of his characters and the relationships between them. It’s his least aggressive and most mature film – a masterpiece from a director who is increasingly making a habit of them.

The White Ribbon is a very free and immersive experience. For a start, it looks incredible, like an antique postcard come to life... But more than that, this is a film that accumulates its power, and although not much happens (that we see) or is even revealed (that we know), there’s a lot to take in, and even more to think about.

Part deconstructed mystery and part clinical observation, Haneke's combination of crisp black and white and neutral framing insightfully reflects the spectrum of social division - wealth, age, gender, education, spirituality, moral conscience - that equally serve as historical précis for prewar Germany and contemporary allegory for religious extremism.