Few contemporary filmmakers are as socially and politically conscious as Austrian-born Michael Haneke, who never shies away from the human story in his challenging motion pictures. With every film we are riveted to the screen yet have the unnerving impulse to look away. Haneke doesn’t set out to shock but he does so anyway because in each masterpiece he succeeds in revealing something we probably didn’t know about the world or the human struggle.

Beginning in 2000, it seems Juliette Binoche quickly became Haneke’s muse in Code Unknown, as she would later go on to star in Cache. Code Inconnu, as it is in French, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Festival. It is a tremendous film spanning several vignettes of people of different races and backgrounds. Code Unknown deals more presciently and prophetically with racial issues than most films this decade (and that includes Paul Haggis’s 2004 best picture winner Crash). Haneke does not impose any cinematic intervention. That is, he offers little music or sound outside of the diegetic. Like his entire body of work, Haneke places every moment of this film in the present tense because everything that occurs is always in the frame itself.

Haneke’s most lascivious film, The Piano Teacher, unsettled and fascinated audiences in 2001 while also garnering three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Isabelle Huppert gives one of her most haunting performances to date as she engages in a sadomasochistic relationship with her much younger music student. With a cinematic approach similar to Code Unknown and the inclusion of beautiful Schubert pieces, Haneke delicately balances eroticism with creepy voyeurism, a voyeurism that mirrors the act of watching a film.

Time of the Wolf, also starring Isabelle Huppert, is Haneke’s take on a post-apocalyptic world. Released in 2003, this film centers on a family’s struggle to cope with life on a planet wrecked by an unknown cataclysm. The imagery is extremely dark, such as dead animals scattered across a ravaged landscape, but Haneke handles this material elegantly and intellectually.

In 2005, Haneke wrote and directed what is arguably his magnum opus. Starring the great Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, Cache—or Hidden in its English translation—walks the knife’s edge between terror and dread as a bourgeois couple receives mysterious videotapes at their doorstep. Though their source is unknown, the tapes look like surveillance, as they are shot from outside the couple’s home. As childhood traumas unravel, these sinister videos take Auteuil’s character back to events regarding the French-Algerian conflict. Not only does Haneke implicate us all in this humanitarian crisis, he also gives cinema one of the most unforgettable final shots of all time—and also one of the most ambiguous.

Haneke gave us hell in 2007 with Funny Games, a shot-for-shot remake of his own Austrian film of the same title from 1997. Featuring yet another ordinary married couple, Funny Games is easily Haneke’s most viscerally impacting film. No violence is shown onscreen but what is off the screen remains most terrifying, as Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are mentally and physically tortured by two disaffected teenagers during a breaking and entering. More than any of his other films, Haneke mocks his American audience for expecting blood and guts. What they’re actually given is a purely psychological experience that is nonetheless horrifying.

The White Ribbon, Haneke’s latest film, has yet to hit American shores but won the Golden Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Though the plot is still veiled in mystery, Ribbon looks to be another film with dark sociopolitical content. Just by looking at the trailer, the film’s stark black-and-white cinematography and the reticent use of sound will probably make this film yet another in a long line of great Haneke films.

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