This is not the place to start with Haneke. (For that, I would suggest Caché, which for all its indie cachet, is a very accessible crystallization of the same themes the director has repeatedly explored in all of his films.) However – though it is formally experimental – it is also emotionally destructive, and the purest, most troubling example I have seen yet of the point Haneke time and time again seems to be trying to make.

In short, that is something about the interplay between violence (and terror more broadly) and the isolation, lack of communication (talking and talking without really communicating) and ubiquitous consumerism that characterize urban Western life at the end of the 20th Century. The media – a prominent character in most of Haneke’s work, be it visual, written or broadcast) – seems to consolidate all of those traits, as well as altering our modes and methods of consumption, and our reactions to the feeling of isolation that ensue. It is no wonder that formally (visually and technically) a standard Haneke film tends to challenge our habits of consumption: the minimal soundtracks; long, frozen shots of the minutiae of domestic relations; scenes that quietly linger an uncomfortable length of time after the dialogue or “action” has passed; uncomfortably intimate, and halfway informative scenes that follow only one end of a telephone conversation; the depiction of real, brutal violence unadorned with Hollywood clichés, moral judgment or the visual eroticism of special effects and big explosions.

71 Fragments contains all of these elements, both in its form and its content. The big, violent act at its center – a student walking into a bank, opening fire, and then committing suicide – bookends (apparently, I didn't count) 71 fragments from a number of seemingly unrelated lives in 1993 Vienna. And so we see the isolation, the rage, the fractured way in which we come to understand the world which leads up to this massacre echo throughout the scenes of the other lives explored here. They are primarily short, depressing snapshots, through which one may infer certain elements of the pain and bitterness in these varied lives, but they never add up to a comprehensive, easily-summarized story. Much like the game of Mikado played during one scene, the characters are faced with a jumble of random events (many trying and/or devastating) and must do their best to unpack them, to make sense of them, to create a cohesive, narrative whole out of their lives that will allow them to avoid the hopelessness to which the student eventually succumbs. By inference, this is also the position in which Haneke places the viewer in the process of watching these Fragments, and the experience is not always pleasurable.

Haneke has written that his films “are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus." I have never seen that so powerfully and uncompromisingly rendered as within these 71 Fragments. In fact, I often felt uncomfortable, provoked or disturbed by the intimacy, small acts of violence and growing, quiet sense of dread that permeated across the empty, black screens that divided the actual fragments.

The final, violent outburst – the shooting/suicide announced at the outset – is one of the most truly brutal things I have ever seen on film. The quiet, discomforting gradualness of the previous hour and a half suddenly explode into a bulldozing moment of acute violence, as all the stories delicately held together through fragmentary half-understandings and fragile narrative cohesion are suddenly, mercilessly, unblinkingly ended. Simply erased. That is truly disturbing, but it is also one of the most remarkable, emotionally affecting experiences I have had watching a movie.