By no means easy to watch and another of the recent raft of film pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable viewing in mainstream cinema Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher is nevertheless a film worth watching.

Isabelle Huppert gives the performance of her career as the middle aged, sexually repressed, spinster piano teacher Erika Kohut, living at home with her highly controlling elderly mother (the pair even share a bed), Kohut has some major problems, given to self mutilation and visiting porn booths she begins a relationship with one of her students Walter Klemmer (played by Benoit Magimel) which turns into a sexually perverse, sadomasochistic affair.

As an exploration of the dark recesses of desire and as a study of how people can be controlled then the movie cannot be faulted. The cast are excellent and the ageing Annie Giradot as Kohut’s mother is both terrifying and sad. Based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek, the Piano Teacher is incredibly intense , very personal and often uncomfortable viewing that you certainly won’t forget in a hurry.

EXTRAS A very interesting interview with director Haneke (explaining how he altered much of the book’s source material), an interview with Elfriede Jelinek, a documentary looking at the post synchronisation process (Isabelle Huppert in the studio having to redub some of her lines, for various reasons every film features this process and not always because of extraneous noise during location filming). Isabelle Huppert also provides an English audio commentary for the movie and there are also the French language and English language versions of the trailer for the movie.