Did everybody missed the point?
There is a famous 1968 'horror' movie by Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf.. it's main premise is about the early morning hours, right before dawn, when, statistically speaking, most deaths are occurring.
Bergman attributes this to the supernatural, higher powers taking over this world. It becomes the realm of the Magic.
Haneke's scene with the boy in the end is the crescendo of the movie.
The boy, like Max von Sydow in 1968, are completely possessed by the ghosts, the legends, the myths, the mystical. In the boy's case, the 36 Just.
The rest of the movie works up to this scene... Humans are stripped of their culture and civilization, and return to the raw instincts of our ancestors. One of them was human sacrifice, which was done when we wanted a favor from the gods.
Haneke's boy is sacrificing himself, like one of the Just, to bring back this lost order, what we call Civilization. Throughout the movie, he shows us that the real, underlying traits of humans, if you strip away the social conventions we adopted for living together, haven't changed at all since ancient times : the primal instincts are always there, and will surface and take control in times of crisis, such as an apocalyptic scenario.
There is a famous 1968 'horror' movie by Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf.. it's main premise is about the early morning hours, right before dawn, when, statistically speaking, most deaths are occurring.
Bergman attributes this to the supernatural, higher powers taking over this world. It becomes the realm of the Magic.
Haneke's scene with the boy in the end is the crescendo of the movie.
The boy, like Max von Sydow in 1968, are completely possessed by the ghosts, the legends, the myths, the mystical. In the boy's case, the 36 Just.
The rest of the movie works up to this scene... Humans are stripped of their culture and civilization, and return to the raw instincts of our ancestors. One of them was human sacrifice, which was done when we wanted a favor from the gods.
Haneke's boy is sacrificing himself, like one of the Just, to bring back this lost order, what we call Civilization. Throughout the movie, he shows us that the real, underlying traits of humans, if you strip away the social conventions we adopted for living together, haven't changed at all since ancient times : the primal instincts are always there, and will surface and take control in times of crisis, such as an apocalyptic scenario.