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Unfunny Games | Troubling deeds are afoot in a pre-World War I German village in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.

Daniel Kasman, The Auteurs’ Notebook | “Simply, [The White Ribbon] deals with community. It is a small village community bound to the estate of a local land-owning baron, and it takes place right before the First World War.... Weaving its way through this setting is paranoia, for violent and unexplained crimes lashing out at both the children and the adults, the poor and the rich of the community begin with The White Ribbon’s first shot and continue unabated and unsolved. A doctor’s horse is tripped, a local disabled boy is beaten, a barn is set on fire: all serve to continually heighten a sense of ambient anxiety around and within this group that lives together but never seems close, never relate like humans.... It is in granting so much pain and power to a community, to a group of people — and especially the town’s children — seen and unseen alike that The White Ribbon strikes as something new brought to the cinema screen, or, perhaps more accurately, something old reinvested with some of its old power.”

Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker | “The White Ribbon is precisely and perfectly made, an austere portrait of a small German town and some malicious goings-on in the years just prior to World War I. I found its grimness enervating, however, and was put off by Haneke’s stoic refusal to make the film’s mysteries either more suspenseful or more mysterious. The targets of Haneke’s critique seemed liked straw men to me. And while the single historical event referenced midway through the film gives the film much-needed context, it also plants the suggestion that The White Ribbon might just boil down to being a dramatically questionable take on the seeds of the 20th century German character.”

Mike D’Angelo, The Onion AV Club | “The White Ribbon announces itself as a long haul right from its ultra-austere, respect-my-authoritay opening credits: white letters, black screen, complete silence. Three minutes of that and you start feeling like you should open up your desk and pull out your notebook, and the lengthy (2.5 hours), deliberate black-and-white period piece that follows does nothing to stave off the sense that your knuckles might be rapped at any moment. The film observes a small, creepy German hamlet in which the adult males are interchangeable abusive martinets (with a dash of incestuous pedophilia), the adult females are uniformly codependent, and every single child looks as if (s)he’s en route to an open casting call for Village of the Damned. Strange things are afoot ... but they’re not really all that strange: a horse tripped by a wire here, a bloody beating there. Mostly they serve to illustrate Haneke’s usual thesis, which is that human beings are inherently deceitful and cruel and hence unworthy of musical accompaniment, much less colour. There’s none of the messy humanity that Juliette Binoche has lent Haneke’s best work, but neither does The White Ribbon punish you in a way that makes you consider your own worst impulses. It’s just a big arty dose of castor oil.”