The Piano Teacher

R

Now Playing

1h 58m

Drama

List

73%

89 Reviews

Tomatometer

81%

10,000+ Ratings

Audience Score

Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Conservatory in Vienna. In her early forties, she lives at home, cooped up with her mother, whose influence Erika escapes only on her regular visits to porn cinemas and peepshows. Her sexuality is an affair of morbid voyeurism and masochistic self-mutilation. Erika and life travel separate paths. Until one day, one of her students gets it into his head to seduce her...

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Critics Consensus

Though it makes for rather unpleasant viewing, The Piano Teacher is a riveting and powerful psychosexual drama.

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Isaiah Y

Well made film by Haneke, but the real highlight was Isabelle Huppert's performance.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

04/14/24

Full Review

Max W

I couldn't believe the ending. This one left me quite flabbergasted

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

01/28/24

Full Review

Rhoyce N

The Piano Teacher Instructs in More Than Mere Music From the outset, Michael Haneke's 2001 psychological drama, The Piano Teacher, entraps the viewer in the tightly wound, claustrophobic internal world of Erika Kohut, a middle-aged classical piano instructor who sleeps in the same bed as her toxically overinvolved mother. By day she is a slave to the rigidly structured institution of classical music training, and by night she is tyrannised by the domineering histrionics of her emotionally manipulative mother. As the screw is wound ever more tightly on the psyche of Erika, played to perilous perfection by French actress Isabelle Huppert, her repressed erotic impulses take a decidedly dark turn, leaking out as voyeurism, self-harm, and a predilection for erotic urination. When Erika is seduced by her much younger piano student, Walter Klemmer, played by a young Benoît Magimel in all his cleft-chinned, chiselled glory, her suppressed urges erupt into unabated sadomasochistic manoeuvrings that are at once bleakly menacing and saddeningly pitiful. Both actors won the Cannes Grand Prix for their performances. Magimel's Walter is as disturbing in his impatient, wanton physicality as Huppert is in her glacially ominous stillness. If Magimel is the wildcat ready to pounce, she is the cold-blooded crocodile calculatedly eying its prey. As their erotic dance descends into perversion, Erika's mind unravels, and a series of deeply disquieting, hard-to-watch moments reveal just how unhinged she is beneath those still waters. As the saying goes, 'It's the quiet ones you have to watch'. Adapted by Haneke from Elfriede Jelinek's novel of the same name, the film is as rigidly structured and tautly directed as Erika's confined world. Windows, doors, bars and elevators hem the title character into her stiflingly claustrophobic matriarchal enclave whilst sharp, cold monumental architecture dwarfs her in her patriarchal, institutional preserve. Yet, oddly, Erika's perverse sexual rebellion finds ways to refute them both. She engages in intimate self-mutilation to spite her mother's insidious sexual repression and commits unseemly licentious acts in the hallowed halls of the Vienna Conservatory as an act of desecration. As the story seesaws the tightrope between unbearably buttoned-down inhibition and a veritable convulsion of miscreant behaviour, the director skilfully transports us from distant viewer to empathic voyeur. When she is suffocating in her minuscule, tightly wound world, we are gasping for air, and when she is debasing herself on tile floors we, like shameful peeping toms, want to look away, but cannot. Frame-within-a-frame compositions entrap us in Erika's world while painfully long takes on Huppert's face, a portrait of conflict, have us palpitating with every indiscernible quiver. As Haneke expertly peels away the layers of Erika's repression, at no point does he shy away from her transgressive and taboo expressions of sexual liberation. Rather, he takes us along with every unrelentingly cruel and carnally depraved moment, daring us to cast the first stone of judgment.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

11/16/23

Full Review

Cyril Joyce A

what if your beautiful piano teacher is still immature at her age ? If i were you boy I will fucking love her

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

11/28/23

Full Review

Leaburn O

This film is very good 👍🏼

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

04/11/23

Full Review

Dave S

Masochism. Depression. Abuse. Rape. Genital mutilation. Alienation. Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher isn't the easiest film to watch and won't leave anyone with any sort of warm and fuzzy feeling. However, as with so much of Haneke's work, it is a wonder to behold from a technical level. Erika Kohut (Isabelle Hubert), a piano instructor with a myriad of deeply-rooted psychological issues, lives with her abusive and controlling mother (Annie Girardot). When she comes in contact with promising young student Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), her already loose tether on life begins to unravel. Hubert is remarkable throughout, but what really steals the show is Haneke's sure-handed direction as, among other things, he wisely and repeatedly allows the camera to remain on faces longer than expected in order to draw out the full emotional impact of the scene. While The Piano Teacher is never easy to watch, it is an excellent movie.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

10/28/23

Full Review

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Michael Haneke

Director

Isabelle Huppert

Erika Kohut

Annie Girardot

The Mother

Benoît Magimel

Walter Klemmer

Anna Sigalevitch

Anna Schober

Susanne Lothar

Mrs. Schober

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Amy Taubin

Village Voice

I found The Pianist unpleasant but, as a case study of female desire, repression, and oedipal trauma, not at all outré.

Mar 31, 2020

Full Review

Empire Magazine

Rated: 4/5

Dec 30, 2006

Full Review

Eleanor Ringel Cater

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This is a penetrating, deeply disturbing examination of desire and loneliness, of desperation and self-denial.

Rated: A-

Nov 4, 2002

Full Review

Matt Brunson

Film Frenzy

Isabelle Huppert outdoes herself.

Rated: 3/4

Oct 3, 2021

Full Review

Nicholas Bell

IONCINEMA.com

If perfection is the only exaggerated nomenclature with which to describe Haneke and Huppert's sordid tango through considerations of submission and control, then it's surely embodied here in the form of Erika Kohut, the piano teacher.

Rated: 5/5

Aug 31, 2020

Full Review

David Harris

Spectrum Culture

The Piano Teacher is high art.

Dec 16, 2019

Full Review

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Synopsis

Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Conservatory in Vienna. In her early forties, she lives at home, cooped up with her mother, whose influence Erika escapes only on her regular visits to porn cinemas and peepshows. Her sexuality is an affair of morbid voyeurism and masochistic self-mutilation. Erika and life travel separate paths. Until one day, one of her students gets it into his head to seduce her...

Director: Michael Haneke
Producer: Yvon Crenn, Christine Gozlan, Michael Katz, Nathalie Kreuther
Screenwriter: Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek
Distributor: Kino Pictures, Artificial Eye, Alta Classics S.L. Unipersonal, MK2 Diffusion
Production Co: MK2 Productions, Centre National de la Cinematographie, Le Studio Canal +, Arte, Eurimages, Les Films Alain Sarde, Arte France Cinema
Rating: R (Language|Aberrant Sexuality|Violence)
Genre: Drama
Original Language: French (Canada)
Release Date (Theaters): Mar 29, 2002, Wide
Release Date (Streaming): Nov 4, 2017
Box Office (Gross USA): $1.0M
Runtime: 1h 58m
Sound Mix: Dolby Stereo, Dolby Digital, Dolby A, Surround, Dolby SR
Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)

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