The Seventh Continent (1989)

Chill Phil (0:10)

The first time we see the titular Seventh Continent, it is an idealized image of an Australian beach, seen early in the film as an advertising photo. And when seen for the final time, it is a moving image. Whether this beautiful but lonely liminal space is some kind of representation of the afterlife, an idealized memory the family at the core of this film have of a better time, or something else that represents death, it is a key image that moves from conceptual to real over the duration of the film. Not unlike the picture of the girl on the beach in the hotel room in the Coen Brothers' 1991 film, Bart and Fink, which by the end of that film seemingly becomes a real place that the character now occupies as some kind of literal or metaphorical death. But of course, in The Seventh Continent, it is absolutely literal, and not metaphorical, that by the end of the film, the Shoba family are dead.

Few filmmakers have feature film debuts that so perfectly encapsulate the style, themes, and mood that will define the rest of their career as Michael Hanake. Prior to making The Seventh Continent, which premiered in 1989, Hanake had already been honing his craft and exploring philosophy and psychology in Austrian theatre and television. So he wasn't exactly a novice when he turned to feature filmmaking. Nevertheless, The Seventh Continent is a startling statement of his artistic and intellectual intent that remains as provocative and captivating now in 2025, as it did over three decades ago.

A highly formal visual style, repetition, long takes, ambiguity, fragmented moments, capturing the mundane to contrast it to the profane. A refusal to present violence as visually appealing, making the audience aware of their voyeurism, and highlighting the despair generated by modern life as a sort of cruel to be kind wake up call to the possibility of something better, are all Hanakei trademarks that are present in his entire filmography and completely present here. Starting with The Seventh Continent, Hanakei's first three feature films are sometimes referred to as his Glaciation Trilogy for the cold way they depict society and societal institutions such as the family, as detached and alienated from humanity due to the impact of mass media, consumerism, and desensitization to violence. All three films have these common themes, which Hanakei would continue to flesh out with in a more sophisticated and complexity as his career progressed. And all three are inspired by actual recent events, where acts of violence were committed with no clear explanation or understanding of why they happened and what the perpetrators were intending.

While the middle film in this thematic trilogy, Bendy's Video, has a lot more in common with Hanakei's more infamous 1997 film Funny Games in its examination of violence as a spectacle of desensitization and societal culpability, the Seventh Continent feels closer in spirit to the third film, and arguably most successful of his first three films, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Both the Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments are a series of often banal moments of everyday life that are assembled in time precisely in the editing to build a growing dread, tension, and introspection about what they are building too.

There is an unspoken yet palpable feeling of despair throughout both films that play on the audience's instinctive awareness that such a mood will reach a breaking point. And yet that breaking point is not delivered with an act of violent action or horror that acts as catharsis, as it so often does in the types of mainstream films that Hanake is openly making his films as counterpoints to. But with a contradictory and chilling sense of both inevitability and sorrow, that it did not have to be like this.

Seventy-one Fragments does this on a broader scale, with a larger cast of everyday characters and more formal boldness, while the Seventh Continent is more intimate and focused on a family of three, and the small world they inhabit and ultimately choose to leave.

In an interview when asked about the origins of the Seventh Continent, Hanake revealed that like the other two films that would follow, the events were inspired by something that happened in the real world. Tellingly, when Hanake attempts to give further details about the real incidents that provide the sparks of inspiration for his films, he often struggles to recall the precise details. This is because the traditional cause and effect details are of little interest to him, and in fact are artificial, and the symptom of a media-saturated audience's desire to find meaning where there is none. Hanake has spoken about how the newspaper article where he first read about the real-life incident did attempt to provide various explanations for what happened, but for him, all that achieved was to diminish the impact of the action. Trying to present a cause despite the impossibility of knowing what really went through the minds of the people carrying out such actions is reductive and meaningless. It must remain ambiguous to resonate.