'The White Ribbon,' a gloomy masterpiece

Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" is a masterpiece, but a demanding one. Haneke immerses viewers, making squeamish voyeurs of them as they watch a small German town come unhinged amid unexplained violence and tragedy as World War I approaches.

The Austrian writer-director ("The Piano Teacher") has crafted a gorgeously gloomy parable exploring the origins of hatred, malice and communal barbarity, the sort of madness of the masses that would explode in Germany a generation later.

Winner of the top prize at last May's Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nominee this year for best foreign-language film, "The White Ribbon" moves with stately melancholy as the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel as an in-the-flesh young man; Ernst Jacobi providing his voice-over narration as an old man) recalls the strange happenings that begin in summer 1913.

Some evildoer sets a wire that trips the horse of the town doctor (Rainer Bock), who is gravely injured. A farmer's wife mysteriously falls to her death. A cabbage field is ravaged, a building is torched, children vanish and are found bound, beaten or mutilated.

The one light of hope is the pure and taintless love that grows between the teacher and a young nanny (Leonie Benesch).

The adults in the town are nameless, Haneke identifying them only by their trade or position. Only the young daughters and sons have names, children reared in severe, even tyrannical devotion to puritan preaching that their lustful, abusive parents fail to follow; children who will emerge from this incubator of malevolence as the generation unleashing the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

These children already may have put that inhumanity into practice. The film hints that the young ones could be responsible for the misdeeds, though Haneke never says for sure. He's not the sort of storyteller to make things easy on his audience by spelling out who's to blame.

Our own times are tough, and "The White Ribbon" is anything but slap-happy Hollywood escapism. It's an eminently worthwhile journey if you're up for the challenge, though.