“Austrian iconoclast Michael Haneke (Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher) copped the best director award at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival for this trenchant thriller featuring two of France’s leading acting lights, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. They play a well-off couple — he’s the host of a popular TV show and she’s in the publishing business — who receive an anonymous videotape on their doorstep showing their house over the course of a couple of hours. Disturbed, they do nothing until another tape arrives, confirming that they are under surveillance. But why? And by whom...? Haneke uses the tropes of the thriller genre to produce a gripping narrative with a pungent political punch. Always the provocateur, Haneke is commenting here on the complacent attitudes displayed by those who have towards those who have not, a complacency that threatens to bring bourgeois society to its knees (witness the recent rampages in the French capital and elsewhere) should it go unaddressed for much longer. That it is his most audience-friendly film to date is icing on the cake.” -PSIFF 2006