The pianist

‘The piano teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) still lives with her mother, who keeps her life under strict surveillance. Erika compensates for her frustrations with voyeuristic escapades, self-mutilation and acts of cruelty – until a piano pupil crosses a line and her neuroses spiral out of control. The sprawling, amorphous and satirical linguistic tangles of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel are masterfully transformed by Michael Haneke into a crystalline structure verging on the (bitter) grotesque: like a bourgeois tragedy that has lost its sense of mourning. At the heart of this tale of an inward flight lies the minimalistically virtuoso performance of Isabelle Huppert, who, as Erika Kohut, takes self-abandonment so far that she scarcely seems to be acting at all.’ (Christoph Huber, Austrian Film Museum)