Each morning, the Schrober family has the same routine: they rise, dress, and eat before George (Berner) drives his wife Anna (Doll) to work and drops off young Eva (Tanzer) at school. But when Anna feigns blindness in class one day, an air of disquiet drops over their home, and prompts them to an unforeseen course of action.

Though their daily routines are synchronized with an almost frightening efficiency, the Schrober family seems to be living a perfectly ordinary, if banal, middle-class existence. But as always with Haneke ("Caché"), there is something disturbing in their machine-like conventionality, which Eva's unexplained faked illness helps shatter. What begins as a study in unconscious alienation soon morphs into an exquisitely rendered portrait of abject horror. Based on a true incident, "Seventh Continent" is an anatomy of people living those "lives of quiet desperation."