Strange events happen at a rural school in the north of Germany during the year 1913, which seem to be ritual punishment. Does this affect the school system, and how does the school have an influence on fascism?

....Shot in black and white and set in what appears to be nineteenth-century rural Germany (the precise date is a crucial late revelation), it initially looks as though Haneke has come over all Bergman and Dreyer on us - there are a great many scenes of a thin-lipped pastor (who could easily have been played by Gunnar Björnstrand) icily admonishing his various charges in a small church straight out of Winter Light, and the stunning compositions (Christian Berger was the DOP) have more than a hint of Nykvist to them.

But it's a Haneke film through and through, mixing icy verbal confrontation (the scene in which the doctor systematically takes his long-term mistress apart is particularly hard to watch) with an abiding impression of unspeakable cruelty about to be meted out - though the children are thrashed behind a forbiddingly closed door, their cries of distress sound horribly authentic. I'm deliberately not going to reveal too much, though - this is a film whose impact comes from the gradual accretion of tiny, sometimes barely perceptible details, with Haneke often cutting at the precise frame where something seems about to be revealed.

(I hear this is getting an English voiceover in the US, though the version I saw was in the original German. I doubt it will make much difference - it's not much of a stretch to imagine the narrator having moved to an English-speaking country and it might even accentuate the abiding L.P. Hartley "the past is a foreign country" impression).