The White Ribbon (2009)

I'm pretty sure I've read someone praising The White Ribbon (In German: Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) in a Thursday Movie Picks post ages ago --that, or I just add movies on my watchlist at random. Anyway, I saw scrolling through my watchlist, I saw it was from Michael Haneke (I loved his Amour) and decided to watch it.

The film is set shortly before the outbreak of World War I in a small village in Northen Germany where strange and inexplicable things begin to happen. First, the doctor (Rainer Bock) is injured when his horse stumbles on a hidden wire; then, a female worker falls into a hole in the rotten floor of a farm and dies; the baron's (Ulrich Tukur) son is found hung upside-down and tortured; the handicapped son of a midwife (Susanne Lothar) is brutally battered. All this is narrated by the town's schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) who in the meantime courts the baron's nanny (Leonie Benesch).