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Le temps du loup (2003) More at IMDbPro »

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63 reviews in total

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29 out of 35 people found the following review useful:
A Family's Struggle Following the Unthinkable, 27 April 2005

Author: Joseph-CTR-Peed from Atlanta GA

This is a stark, dark, unconventional, and unsettling story film. But in the context of that chaos, what it means to be human is beautifully developed. The story revolves around a single French family thrown into the countryside in some post-apocalyptic period. The producer uses an almost documentary approach to the story. This reveals to us the rather drastic and desperate nature of their circumstances, but, unexpectedly, also reveals things like kindness to strangers, forbearance with other's weaknesses, fortitude, and reaching out. These positive human traits are contrasted with those of the stubborn uncaring adolescent boy who would rather hang off in the wood, and venture in only to steal what he wants... the lone Wolf. Its a very engaging and moving work. At one point, I found myself in tears at one particularly heart-rending scene. Humanity at a time of great stress is poignantly pictured, both in its strengths, and in its Sin. The acting is simply incredible, especially the mother and her younger daughter. Unlike the Hollywood films, this film offers no magic solutions, no instant fixes, no easy outs. Goverments have failed, and now common people are paying the price. Society has been reduced to the lowest common denominators. But the film seems to conclude with the idea that recovery is possible, through cooperation and sacrifice. There is some closure to the family's immediate straits. This film has the power to make us think about what we are doing to each other, and what might possibly happen if we let them go over the edge............

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34 out of 49 people found the following review useful:
Haneke and Hobbes, 31 January 2005

Author: Rogier van Reekum from Netherlands

It is funny to me how a lot of people react to this movie. It seems they feel that this movie shows us decadent westerners what living in more impoverished and exploited parts of the globe is like. Well, it's a very fine film, but that certainly not what it's about. To reduce every artistic expression to world affairs is a rather shameless exposition of western self-guilt and political correctness. Now, there is enough to be ashamed about, but why should that always be connected to artistic expressions of western artists. Please stop politicizing everything. Le Temps du Loup is not about the third world, anyone who thinks that third world countries look any thing like what is happening in Haneke's film is out of his/her mind. News flash, people in the third world actually life daily, relatively stable lives, notwithstanding rampant poverty and high levels of violence and unsafety. What we see in Le Temps du Loup is what Hobbes means by "State of Nature", a lawless, non-dominated society. What Haneke shows in minute detail (and in that lies his greatest accomplishment) is that human connection, trust and intimacy is always in some senses based on dominating practices that stabilize the uncertainties and risks of interacting and competing with others in a shared social environment. The ambiguous status of the Koslowski character is a case in point, are his actions justifiable or is he just an exploitative oppressor? Same for the horse, but now in a more confronting way, because the line between fact and fiction is crossed. So Temps du Loup is an analysis of human co-habitation of any human society. Art is not political, what we do with it is.

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26 out of 34 people found the following review useful:
Exceptionally directed, 25 December 2004

Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

If there's one subgenre that particularly appeals to me, it is the post-apocalyptic movie, or any movie dealing with the end of civilization. I don't know why the subject fascinates me so, but it does. Haneke's The Time of the Wolf is one of the best of its type ever made. Some sort of cataclysm has occurred – all we really know is that most water supplies are tainted – and we follow a mother and her two children (the father is with them when the film opens) as they vie for survival. Life now is all about the few material possessions you have preserved. You try to hold onto a semblance of your values, but they seem mostly vestigial. Isabelle Huppert returns as Haneke's star. She and her children are the point around which everything happens, but they are just three people amongst many. The young girl who plays her daughter, Anaïs Demoustier, gives a particularly amazing performance. We talked (ed: on the Classic Film forum of IMDb) last week (or perhaps the week before) about the directors influenced by Hitchcock and those influenced by Bresson, and Huppert in an interview explains how both directors have influenced Haneke. It's definitely true. Haneke uses suspense in a much different manner than Hitchcock, but the devices are surprisingly similar.

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21 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
Essentially essential., 14 May 2005

Author: (sothisislife) from Southern California

I cannot help but think that Time of the Wolf is some kind of vindication for horror movie enthusiasts. Not because it is a horror movie itself, but because if you threw in some zombies you might have Day of the Dead, or one of the characters from this movie might have gotten lost and ended up in Last House on the Left. Time of the Wolf is a raw encounter with human nature.

It is not overly dramatic nor does it attempt to downplay what is going on, it plays out quite literal, the characters seem fully human and fully diverse. It is bleak but it has reason to be, and it never borders on dull or indulgent, every minute of the movie is focused and tight. It does not come off self-conscious, yet it does not unravel like a typical movie. It makes no mention of its origins, how the people got there or why, but it does not need to, because the story is not at all about the disaster, but about the people after the disaster. In other words, it is as far away from Armageddon as a movie could hope to be.

What was most interesting to me was the playing field. Since there is such hopelessness in every frame, such a sense of loss for every character, there is never anyone to root against. I felt as if even the worst of them might it out alive it would be an accomplishment, a cause for victory. Since everyone is on the same level, each character can be approached with an attempt to understand his/her motives, making each character not only tolerable, but likable. That is not to say there are not "bad" characters, as there are, but the good and bad becomes very muddled in a time in which everyone is losing everything. It is a very amoral situation the characters are in.

I highly recommend the film for all types of film lovers. It is a trip everyone should go on at least once.

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15 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
Unique post-apocalypse drama, 6 April 2005

Author: ThrownMuse from The land of the Bunyips

A French woman (Isabelle Huppert) and her two young children struggle for survival shortly after an unidentified apocalypse. This is a very different sort of post-apocalyptic film--it is very minimalist and dramatic. The most fascinating aspect is that whatever happened to the world is never explained or even discussed by the characters. The only thing they know is that uncontaminated water is scarce and personal belongings are very valuable. They are living in the present, fighting for survival. The characters are often devoid of extreme emotion during the crises they face in the film, so the viewer assumes that whatever happened that changed the world must have been graphic and brutal.

Haneke is an exceptional filmmaker and has quite an eye. The combination of lingering camera-work and lack of score create an uneasy tension. Some might argue that the movie is boring because there isn't much action, but I thought it was visually stunning. The movie attempts to be about post-apocalypse social struggle and power--including conflict between different nationalities and genders--but it could have been more successful in doing this. The acting is outstanding (especially by Huppert and the actress that plays her daughter). Even though she gets co-billing, Beatrice Dalle is only in the film for a bit, but she does have a "Betty Blue"-style freak-out. I recommend this to anyone who likes post-apocalypse movies and is interested in seeing a hauntingly realistic one.

My Rating: 7/10

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20 out of 30 people found the following review useful:
A Chilling Pleasure, 5 July 2004
Author: CharlesKinbote from United States

Just saw TIME OF THE WOLF in New York City, and it is a complete pleasure. A very subtle film about individual and mass psychology after an unnamed cataclysm.

Also a cautionary tale about having plenty of fresh batteries, lighters, and a good knife, or knives, on hand (you never know when you're going to have to skin your own dinner; hey, call me extreme when that unnamed cataclysm comes around).

An added bonus: no digital effects (although I think they got lucky with fog one day, and made a beautiful scene with it), no manic editing as a substitute for storytelling, no facile heroics, no predictable deus ex machina...it will cleanse the visual palette. It stars Isabelle Huppert, but she is so naturalistic you forget she's Isabelle Huppert.

For an altogether different, but equally pleasurable, although more theatrical, yet completely underrated take on the unnamed cataclysm bit, see

A BOY AND HIS DOG. A dream of a movie.

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14 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
Temps Du Loup.., 18 February 2005

Author: alexx668

"Temps Du Loup" is probably Michael Haneke's most successful attempt at presenting his bleak outlook on mankind.

Vaguely set in a post-apocalyptic world, the film works both ways: a. at isolating various institutions and values (society, family, religion) outside of their normal environment, and therefore analyzing them more thoroughly; b. as an exercise in evoking beautiful imagery out of spartan and plain settings.

While the first is certainly no new ground for Haneke (the storyline is less complex than his previous effort, "La Pianiste", yet the scope is much grander), the second means that this is his most cinematic and elegant effort yet.

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14 out of 22 people found the following review useful:
If you've been looking a reason not to live..., 3 November 2005

Author: glykon from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Time of the Wolf may be the most unrelievedly bleak 2 hours available. Other than a few horrific scenes of animal cruelty (is there no French equivalent of the ASPCA?), Wolf's pain in relentless, but relentlessly muted. After all, unbridled pain would suggest the possibility of cartharsis or resolution, and there is none of either to be found here.

In the first scene, a man is murdered in cold blood, and his family seems hardly ruffled by this inconvenience, instead carrying on with the same grim determination that has gripped this film since the beginning of time (or, at least, the opening credits). A litany of misfortune follows -- overwrought nose bleeds, a perishing parakeet, accidental torching of the barn the blighted family takes shelter in, the liaison with a deranged youth (to whom the teenage daughter is inexplicably attracted, despite his physical, emotional and psychological repulsiveness), make-believe self-immolation.

Perhaps intended as a 21st Century ode to Camus's "The Plague," Wolf tells us nothing we don't already know. People's most evil inner nature emerges in the time of great crisis --- duh! Wolf is probably closer to Lord of the Flies, but absent all elements of surprise and drama.

Incongruously, there is much footage of verdant fields and forests, including a wheat field rustling somewhere near the little train station of horrors, where the benighted survivors of some unexplained eco-disaster seem to accumulate by accident. Perhaps this scenery is intended as irony, but irony suggests, in some small way, a sense of humor at work, and there is surely no such sense at work in this film.

Or maybe there is? When the film ends, more or less, with the utterance of "everything could still work out, maybe even tomorrow," the viewer is left wondering if Woody Allen was asked to provide the closing dialog. But to little avail -- the viewer is likely to have slit his wrists well before tomorrow.

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12 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Social collapse, 4 June 2004

Author: stensson from Stockholm, Sweden

Hanneke is the only director of his kind. His world is depressing. Courage, kindness, love is of no use.

But there is a glimpse of light at the end of this movie. Courage is rewarded from someone you didn't expect that from. Maybe Hanneke is getting old, but you think a little about Tarkovskij's "Ivan Rublov". Whatever happens, man begins to create again. Even in a total social collapse and it doesn't matter whether it's 15th century Russia or France of today.

There is great power in Beatrice Dalle's acting here. European film needs her. Isabelle Hupert is tuned down. Not a big sacrifice for such a big artist.

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4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
The milk train does not stop here anymore., 28 July 2007
Author: dbdumonteil

This is perhaps Haneke's least accessible work,which is not writing that his other works are entertaining stuff.The star Isabelle Huppert becomes some kind of walk on in the second part which makes me think that the movie would have been better without her (and using non professional actors à la Robert Bresson) This movie shows groups of people,leaving the cities (which we do not see) for... Nobody knows,a train is expected ,but where does it take its passengers?And does this train exist anyway? Several hints at the Bible might suggest another Deluge or another Sodom and and Gomorrah (the just men;a man uses the words :biblical simplicity) ,the station,with all his languages might be another tower of Babel,and the letter the boy writes to his late father has Christian accents (he really thinks his dad reads him from... Heaven?).

Like this?Try these......

"Black Moon" Louis Malle 1975

"Skammen" Ingmar Berman 1968

"Les égarés" André Téchiné 2003

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