Le Temps du loup (2003) - film review

With society falling apart in the wake of some global catastrophe, a French family hope to take refuge in their country home.   Shortly after they arrive, they find their house is occupied.  The father is killed instantly, leaving his wife, Anna, and their two children with nothing but a bicycle and a few meagre provisions.  Continuing their increasingly desperate trek across the barren countryside, the young family arrives at a former railway station which now serves as a refuge for a group of survivors.  How are these people going to cope with the sudden changes that have been forced upon them?

Having given us some of the most inventive and disturbing cinema in recent years, Michael Haneke takes on what is arguably his most daring subject to date: a disaster movie set in some unspecified near-future époque.  To his credit, Haneke eschews the big-budget special effects of contemporary Hollywood productions and instead focuses entirely on the psychological impact of an unknown apocalypse on a disparate group of human beings.  Put in these terms, it appears that Haneke would have a sure winner on his hands.  Unfortunately, despite a promising start and a very few powerful images along the way, the film is a massive disappointment.

Haneke fails to give the film the cohesion and bite of his earlier works and where shock scenes are included – such as a horse having its throat cut in close-up – these serve merely to aggravate an already disenchanted audience.  Part of the problem is that the nature of the disaster which has occurred is never revealed to us, so the situation feels too abstract, too remote for any audience to identify with.  Secondly, instead of showing us believable reactions of the survivors to their post-apocalyptic Hell, all the film gives us is the same old predictable histrionics you’d find in any other second rate disaster film.  As if that wasn’t enough, the film fails to get any value out of its talented lead actors – which include Isabelle Huppert and Béatrice Dalle, whose contributions are as flat, complacent and remote as the film is in general.

© James Travers 2004

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