Unfortunately, it all goes seriously awry - instead of seeing the film we're promised (competing accident-causing gangs trying to outdo one another), we're instead treated to a disappointingly generic tale of paranoia and insanity. By the end it's a cheap cop out, a telegraphed ending that simply deflates all the promise of the start.

I look forward to the film we were setup to see, a classic Spy vs. Spy action movie where the filmmakers don't succumb to banal psychological exploration of their lead characters. Until then, watch Accident as a minor pleasure, more frustrating for what could have been given the materials at hand.

Viggo once again pulls out all the stops, and he seems genuinely close to death through much of the film. The horror of the world is shown in bitter detail, but there are a number of distractions from the visual medium of film that, I fear, may detract from the work. Where in a book one can simply describe a starving, emaciated child, there's great difficulty in suspending disbelief in the film, in not being distracted by those things that indicate over and over again that the world shot isn't in fact dead.

It's a compelling enough premise that one's left looking for ways of surviving, from the leaves littering the ground to burning tires for fuel. Yet, of course, this simply should be accepted as a limitation of the visual information the film portrays.

In the end, however, these distractions make the whole affair less awful, less heart wrenching than the book no doubt must be. As it plays, there's just such a plodding trudge of the story, where everything expected of such a tale unfolds in like some pulp procedural drama.

I'm comparing directly to the last McCarthy book to be filmed, the sublime "No Country...", where, frankly, I was never sure what was to happen, who was to live or die. Not so for "The Road", locked to its narrative path, telegraphic the ending early on, removing all sense of suspense at the detriment to the tale. While all the elements should be there for a fine film, it simply does not come together in the end.

Superficially, the plot is about a small town in Germany just before the start of the Great War. A series of crimes occur, unsettling the quiet of the small town. This causes disruption in the steady order, from parent to child, baron to worker, priest to congregation. We see in almost pedestrian fashion the infection of evil spread, with small actions of hatred growing ever larger.

Yet the film, with tremendous restraint, never escalates outside the scope of the town. The point, it seems clear from the opening monologue, is to show the sheer banality of evil, the startling ease by which the actions of even children (taught by the provocative, yet common brutality of their parents' strictness) can lead to devastating consequences.

It cannot for a moment be forgotten the films tacet historical undertone - these children, after all, grow up to be the core of the National Socialist movement, and in so doing they fulfill the sins of their parents' abusive behaviour. Yet, the film is far more universal in its exploration, a universality that's in direct odds with the claustrophobic, small-town setting. By contextualizing the everyday evil, the small mindedness and petty bickering, Haneke exposes in a beautifully subtle way the real force of actions that spelled doom for untold millions. In other words, this contagion of evil, from parent to child, is hardly unique to the German volk.
The evil of dogmatism, of a certain small-minded, provincial attitude that when taken to its extreme form results in the seemingly inevitably cyclic brutality on a mass scale, is the core "horror" that underlies this film. Eschewing over-the-top gore, this film horrifies with the commonplace nature of the actions of almost everyone in the town.

This is a beautiful, haunting work.