Michael

Michael (2011) is Austrian director Markus Schleinzer's drama, available to watch online on iFILM. To everyone around him, Michael is an unremarkable insurance clerk. In the soundproofed basement of his tidy house, a ten-year-old boy is kept locked in a room.

Schleinzer, for years a casting director for Michael Haneke, turns down both the thriller and the sermon. He films five months of this arrangement as a flat domestic record — dinners, a supermarket run, a Christmas morning — and lets the horror seep out of the everyday. Michael Fuith plays no monster, only a man, which is precisely what pulls the floor out from under you.

It premiered in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and split the room down the middle: some called it fearless, others called it exploitation of an unspeakable subject. The film is heavy, cold and grants no relief at the end — clearly not for every viewer. Stream Michael (2011) online on iFILM.