Casting viewers as accomplices

One key moment of the film is an excruciatingly long take in which Watts, bound, struggles to make her way across a room. The raw physical effort involved, as well as the emotional dread her action underscores, reads as all too real. Haneke does not rupture the reality of the moment, taking an almost sadistic glee in what his star endured as the shot plays on and on.

"He doesn't believe in stage binding, he wants everything to be 100% real," Watts said of the scene, which she recalled as the most difficult of the shoot. "At times, it was like torture."

The hard-core gorehound action junkies -- those movie-goers whose lids could be most thoroughly flipped by Haneke's inside-out convolutions -- will likely never turn up for something this heady. For Haneke, forcing viewers to examine their own expectations and responses is exactly the point.

"That is precisely why I made the film," he said, "the viewer pays for it, as you say, with having to think about it, his role as a viewer and as an accomplice in the action. I often say those who watch the film to the end, they obviously needed it, and those who leave early did not need it."

To reveal the ways in which Haneke continually throws viewers outside the action, only to reel them back into his false reality, would go beyond conventional spoilers.

"This is the method of the film, to show the viewer how manipulatable he or she is," said Haneke, "because, after all, I show that it is a film and five minutes later [the viewer] is back completely with it. I show this again and again, so the viewer realizes his role in this whole process."

"He messes with you as an audience," is how Watts explained Haneke's motives. "You're taken by surprise. And I'm not preaching or saying I'll never do another violent film, but I am quite proud to be involved in something that makes us as an audience question what we're cheering for when brains are splattered on the wall."