A chilling glance at the apocalypse

In Michael Haneke’s “Time of the Wolf,” the apocalypse arrives not with a big bang but a shot to the heart. Set in the present in an unnamed European country, the film opens with a family arriving at a cabin tucked picturesquely in the woods. Bustling tiredly out of their van, the family enters the cabin -- perhaps on vacation or perhaps in retreat -- and discovers another family in its place. Threats ricochet off the walls, a bullet is fired, and blood splatters across a woman’s face. In the time of the wolf, strangers are predators and each loved one their prey.

Written and directed by Haneke, this intellectual horror movie traces what happens to one of those families when the world enters a near total eclipse -- it’s a frighteningly potent glimpse into the abyss. Turned out into the dark, Anne (Isabelle Huppert) and her children, Eva (Anais Demoustier) and Ben (Lucas Biscombe), plunge into a nightmare of emptied streets, deserted villages and pyres stacked with the remains of contaminated cows. The family begs food from former neighbors, most of whom ignore their pleading, and move from one shelter to the next. At a small roadside barn, they meet a feral young teenager (Hakim Taleb), whom they come to know as “the boy” and in whose wary, mistrusting face it is possible to read an epic of misery.

After some harrowing roadside encounters, the foursome makes its way to a railway station where other survivors have started to tentatively build the foundation for a new society. The stragglers include a rapacious fixer (Olivier Gourmet, the benevolent carpenter in “The Son”), a bickering married couple (Beatrice Dalle and filmmaker Patrice Chereau) and various other lost souls (Brigitte Rouan and Daniel Duval are among the notable faces). Here, at the end of the line, where women barter sexual favors for food and children die simply, horribly, of thirst, Anne’s family struggles to claim a bit of space, a sense of belonging. In time, still more refugees -- better equipped, more capably organized -- descend on the station, adding to the confusion even while they also contribute to a sense of regained hope.

“Time of the Wolf” is one of the most harrowing and plausible visions of apocalypse since George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie shocker, “Night of the Living Dead.” The comparison may seem unlikely given that Romero’s reputation as a Grand Guignol master and Haneke’s bona fides as a European auteur. The Austrian director’s films screen at important festivals across the globe, and his last few features -- the modern morality tale “Code Unknown” and the discomforting sexual freakout “The Piano Teacher” -- premiered at Cannes. So did “Time of the Wolf,” which last year was greeted with boos and faint applause after its first Cannes press screening. The director has passionate admirers, but even those who praise Haneke for his ideas and lapidary visual style sometimes castigate his films as emotionally chilly, even sadistic.

In view of the stories Haneke seems drawn to -- with their themes of screen violence (“Benny’s Video”), torture (“Funny Games”), genocide and casual murder (“Code Unknown”), incest and sexual perversion (“The Piano Teacher”) -- this critical ambivalence isn’t surprising. And yet Haneke is one of the finest directors working in movies today, and his work merits greater, more scrupulous consideration. If nothing else, the charges of chilliness raise the question of what exactly is wrong with emotional cool, especially if it’s art, not men, at issue? It’s a puzzle why, of all the arts, movies should be burdened with a presumption of warmth, as if they were enormous baby blankets meant to make us feel all cozy inside and out. Haneke, whose work reveals a preoccupation with fascism, has no interest in making us comfortable.

That said, it’s a relief that the filmmaker has largely shed the punitive, unnecessary cruelty that characterizes movies such as “Funny Games,” a film that exploits human suffering to tediously score its points. Beginning with “Code Unknown,” an imperfect, sporadically brilliant exploration of how violence begets violence from France to Romania, Haneke appears to have largely abandoned the tactic of trying to make his audience feel complicity with the violence he unleashes. As in “The Piano Teacher,” in which Huppert turned her insides out to deliver an open wound of a performance, this new film coolly takes measure of the ways an individual’s humanity can be stripped away. In “Time of the Wolf,” however, Haneke also suggests, without ceremony and tears, the ways that humanity can be recovered.

In a world where people hover at the brink of the apocalypse every day -- some 300,000 in Sudan, the news tells us, are nearly there already -- there is something bracing and welcoming about “Time of the Wolf.” I saw the film for a second time last week and for the second time came away impressed by Haneke’s craft; the first 30 minutes or so takes place in near dark and is a tour de force of technique. More striking, though, is Haneke’s insistence on a deeply engaged cinema, his drive to make movies that grapple not only with the limits of technique (as this one certainly does), but also with what it means to be human. For Anne and her children, who find themselves at the crossroads of civilization and its annihilation, there is no greater question. Is it too uncool to say the same holds true for us?

*

‘Time of the Wolf’

MPAA rating: R, for some violence, language and sexuality/nudity

Times guidelines: Warning: extremely graphic, real violence against animals; adult language and themes; nudity

Isabelle Huppert...Anne

Anais Demoustier...Eva

Lucas Biscombe...Ben

Hakim Taleb...the boy

Released by Palm Pictures. Writer, director Michael Haneke. Producers Margaret Menegoz, Veit Heiduschka. Image Jurgen Jurges. Sound Guillaume Sciama, Jean-Pierre Laforce. Editing Monika Willi, Nadine Muse. Set decoration Christoph Kanter. Costumes Lisy Christl. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

Exclusively at Landmark’s Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 478-6379.