Michael Haneke is one of the most significant filmmakers working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), The Piano Teacher (2001), Caché (2005), The White Ribbon (2009), Amour (2012), Happy End (2017), and others. Having started out as a dramaturge and film critic, this Austrian auteur didn't make his feature film debut until the age of 47. It was 1989's chilling drama The Seventh Continent. Since then, Haneke has been defying boundaries, exploring the darker recesses of the human psyche.

An often controversial filmmaker with two Palme d'Or awards (for The White Ribbon and Amour) and the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (for Amour), Haneke has said:

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American "barrel down" cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.

Let's look at some of his best movies, ranked.

7 The Piano Teacher

Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher
MK2 Diffusion

Based on the novel by Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, the 2001 psychosexual drama The Piano Teacher follows an alienated middle-aged piano professor Erika (Isabelle Huppert), who starts a sadomasochistic affair with her young pupil Walter (Benoît Magimel). In The Piano Teacher, Haneke smashes all existing norms and explores the violence of desire. The controversial film resulted in the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and top acting awards for Huppert and Magimel.

Related: These Were Some of the Most Controversial Movies Ever Made

6 The Seventh Continent

The Seventh Continent, 1989's drama directed by Michael Haneke
Wega Film

Haneke’s mature and confident feature debut, 1989’s The Seventh Continent, already introduces themes of alienation and violence that would become a hallmark of his subsequent movies. It is the first film in Haneke’s "emotional glaciation" trilogy (followed by 1992’s Benny's Video, in which a boy obsessed with violent films commits terrible acts, and 1994’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, in which split storylines shows an environment of suppressed menace).

Chicago Tribune described The Seventh Continent as "a calm chronicle of hell," and it truly is one of the most patiently devastating and brutal films ever made. This slow-burn drama follows an average Austrian middle-class family who has sinister plans. Haneke observes the domestic tragedy from a distance without providing a psychological explanation for his characters’ actions, which makes us uncomfortable and disturbed.

5 Caché

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche in Caché
Les films du losange

For the 2005 psychological thriller Caché, also known as Hidden, Haneke won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. At the heart of Caché is the question of how guilt is dealt with. In the film, paranoia grips a typical well-to-do Parisian family, Anne and Georges (played by Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil), who start receiving videotapes showing their daily life. The tapes lead the couple to track down a potential stalker, the Algerian from Georges' past. Caché mixes Hitchcockian tension and an allegory about collective guilt, pointing out colonialism and France's Algerian War.

4 Happy End

Jean-Louis Trintignant in Happy End
Filmladen

Haneke’s latest work, the 2017 drama Happy End, is a grim examination of the modern world through the lens of the singularly unhappy Laurent family. Like in the filmmaker's Amour, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert play surprisingly similar roles of father and daughter here – but there is almost no love in cynical Happy End. Trintignant’s character, 84-year-old Georges, looks for a way to kill himself, Huppert’s Anne has problems with the family construction business, and Georges’ 13-year-old granddaughter Eve (Fantine Harduin) might have poisoned her mother. There is no happy ending for that malcontent privileged family.

3 Funny Games

Ulrich Mühe and Arno Frisch.in Funny Games
Concorde-Castle Rock/Turner

A psychological home invasion thriller, 1997’s Funny Games follows two psychotic young men, Peter and Paul (played by Frank Giering and Arno Frisch), who take an innocent family hostage and subject them to nightmarish abuse in their idyllic summer home. One of the most disturbing and nihilistic movies ever made, Funny Games wanted to denounce violence – but, as The New York Times wrote, many viewers saw Haneke’s radical film as "a sophisticated act of cinematic sadism."

In 2007, the filmmaker made an American shot-for-shot remake of the same title. 2007’s Funny Games stars Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as two psychopaths dressed in white, and Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as a well-to-do couple tortured by Pitt’s and Corbet’s characters. His only English-language film, it might be Haneke's most appropriate work yet, as he so often critiques American cinema but in a way that is often left unseen by American audiences.

2 The White Ribbon

The White Ribbon, the black-and-white film by Michael Haneke
Filmladen

With his first of two Palme d’Or winners, 2009’s black-and-white drama The White Ribbon, Haneke is looking for the root of evil, taking us to a quiet but repressed German village just before World War I. "My main aim was to look at a group of children who are inculcated with values transformed into an absolute and how they internalize them. If we raise a principle or ideal, be it political or religious, to the status of an absolute, it becomes inhuman and leads to terrorism," the filmmaker told Cineuropa. A mysterious meditation on climates of violence where Nazism was born, The White Ribbon is a modern classic that will stand the test of time.

Related: Some of the Best World War Two Movies From a German and Axis Perspective

1 Amour

Emmanuelle Riva in Amour
Les Films du Losange

One of the most heartbreaking films ever, Haneke’s second Palme d’Or winner and his first Oscar winner, 2012’s Amour, is a masterpiece about love, death, and everything in between. The filmmaker's most human picture follows a French couple in their eighties, bedridden Anne and her husband Georges (a brilliant combination of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant). Poignant performances by titans of French cinema make the film timeless.