The White Ribbon is a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours, this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety.

It has chilling brilliance and icy exactitude, filmed in black and white with the lustre of liquid nitrogen, and its director, Michael Haneke, achieves a new refinement of mastery and audacity. He has created a film whose superb technical finish and closure seems to me in contrast to its status as an "open" text, a work which resists clear interpretation. It reminded me of the group-guilt dramas of Friedrich Dьrrenmatt and Max Frisch, and also the 1980 novel Wie Deutsch Ist Es? by Walter Abish, in which the son of a 1944 anti-Hitler plotter, who has just testified against a gang of fellow terrorists, returns to West Germany from France in the 1970s and asks himself how much of his homeland is in his soul. How German is it? Applied to The White Ribbon, the answer to this question can only be: very, very German indeed.