Bullies often torment those they consider weak as part of a vicious cycle, one stemming from their being dominated by someone else with control issues. Though it's bad enough when this power structure exists between peers, it's even more disturbing to see it play out between parents and children, the latter's innate trust of the former allowing for deeper damage. In his unsettling new drama "The White Ribbon," filmmaker Michael Haneke observes the "strange events" that unfold over the course of a year in a small German village just before World War I and suggests that this generational dynamic, couched in old-world Protestant morality and for-your-own-good-ness, had a deadly resonance. Or, as our narrator puts it, these events "could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country."

"The White Ribbon" opens with the local doctor being thrown from his horse, the victim of a nearly invisible wire strung between two trees. Then a farmer's wife dies after falling through the rotted floor of a barn. These incidents seem unrelated, but as the former schoolteacher recounts the happenings in flashback and with decades of hindsight, he's not convinced that they were. More odd occurrences take place, some of them clearly in cruel retribution. Though we don't usually know who's doing what and why, there is nonetheless a palpable current of wickedness running through the village, this semi-feudal society lorded over by heartless men with dutiful wives and obedient children.

But there's something creepy about the kids; with their dead eyes and pack mentality, it's obvious that they're in crisis, as well as at whose hands they're suffering. "The White Ribbon" watches as the menfolk rule their families with an abusive pride they mistake for tough love, completely oblivious - or perhaps indifferent - to the sway that they have over their vulnerable children, who may or may not be finding a violent outlet for the helplessness they're made to feel at home. Haneke reportedly auditioned more than 7000 young people to populate his little Village of the Damned, and the kids he chose are astonishing, especially the pastor's eldest, played by Maria-Victoria Dragus and Leonard Proxauf. After returning home late one evening their father forces them to wear the white ribbon of the title to remind them of their innocence and purity. Strangely, he doesn't ask what they'd been up to.

Never one to shy away from life's uglier truths - you know this if you endured "Caché," or "Funny Games" in either language - Haneke includes some uncomfortable scenes in which the simmering malice breaks the surface, most notably the exchange between the sadistic doctor (Rainer Bock, "Inglourious Basterds") and the mistress he now resents (Haneke regular Susanne Lothar). An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film, "The White Ribbon" also received a nod for Christian Berger's chilly cinematography, which nicely mirrors the austerity of the village's repressive climate, one that Haneke hints was the perfect temperature for the seeds of fascism. And the elegant black-and-white imagery makes it difficult for anyone to look the other way... this time.