[Haneke's] movies combine normal storytelling with a certain strain of postmodern provocation. Haneke is such a technical virtuoso, so skilled at camerawork and framing, atmosphere and mood, that it's easy not to see that he's aiming beyond the boundaries of ordinary narrative. He treats his characters with generosity and respect (or at least the ones he takes seriously), but he is also, always, seeking to remind us that we are participants in an artificial, highly ritualized process: the act of watching a film. So the middle-class family members terrorized by an invisible voyeur in "Caché" are characters in a story, but the force tormenting them is, like Augustine's conception of God, not to be found inside their world.

...Haneke comments ruefully that "Funny Games" - intended as an indictment of the audience appetite for violence - has itself become a cult movie among horror fans in English-speaking countries. (I don't know how he hopes to avoid a similar fate for his forthcoming American remake of the film, starring Tim Roth and Naomi Watts.) His other movies don't all possess the same level of overt gamesmanship, but once you understand that he wants you to watch yourself watching his film - and that the boundary between narrative and "reality," between story and commentary, is highly porous - they start to make a lot more sense.

I was particularly struck by Haneke's first film after his post-"Funny Games" relocation to France, the 2001 "Code Unknown," which wasn't much seen outside Europe and struck some of his fans as a sellout. (Translation: Nobody gets gruesomely killed.) It's a slithery, fragmentary work that follows the consequences of a random Parisian street encounter as they ripple through several disparate lives across the continent. "Code Unknown" has more of an overt social message than most of Haneke's films, but it also has a powerful psychological undertow; it seeps into your subconscious and ends up every bit as disturbing as "Funny Games."

This set also includes Haneke's excellent 1997 adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Castle" (made for Austrian TV), along with his early study of violence and dissociation, "Benny's Video," and "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance," a study of a Columbine-like massacre that predates Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" by a decade, and outdoes it too.