The build-up scenes of talk and philosophising, in salons and sitting rooms, are hypnotic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 4, 2015

From this droll premise, potentially as dark and dry as blackened toast, Hausner spins a witty, unexpectedly touching meditation on the nature of partnership and the elasticity of fate.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 4, 2015

This visual confinement underscores the lack of intimacy and agency in Henriette's life. Her longing for escape is understandable. She's surrounded by men for whom a woman's life is predicated on silence.

| Aug 3, 2015

There's no blood pumping through Hausner's characters' veins.

| Original Score: C | Jun 17, 2015

Less than propulsive as a narrative, but provocative, instructive, consistently surprising and a kind of slow-motion thriller.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 26, 2015

Despite being inspired by actual events, it all comes off more confounding than tragic or romantic.

| Mar 19, 2015

Despite the film's tightly constructed reserve, Hausner saves one last trick for the end: As unknowable as these characters are, you may be surprised how much you miss them.

| Mar 18, 2015

It illustrates, both bluntly and gently, the stultifying trap of male influence.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 18, 2015

Hausner's film feels authentically quiet and slower-paced for the time period ...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 18, 2015

It can be a strategically off-putting movie yet one that also steals under your skin scene by scene and through Ms. Schnoeink's slowly revealing performance as an ill-fated heroine turned future biographical footnote.

| Mar 18, 2015

One thing's certain: This is no swoony love story. It intoxicates all the same.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 17, 2015

[writer-director Jessica Hausner has] made a bone-dry comedy of manners, finding absurdist humor in material most filmmakers would probably play straight.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 17, 2015

Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner has an unerring talent for examining, skeptically but never cynically, grand notions about destiny ...

| Mar 17, 2015

The colorful costumes and décor have more character than the blandly coached cast, and the stiff, tableau-like images are a vain artistic pose.

| Mar 15, 2015

Jessica Hausner is less interested in historical revisionism than mining this real-life tragedy for its existential thrust.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 15, 2015

What really fascinates is the comedy of errors -- and manners -- that Hausner stages along the way, commenting sardonically on the various mishaps, misunderstandings and missed connections that ensue.

| Mar 10, 2015

The plot barely reaches a crawl. But Hausner's formal rigour is undeniably hypnotic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 10, 2015

The narrative screws of Hausner's screenplay are impressively tightened.

| Mar 10, 2015

The mise-en-scene is appropriately suffocating, marked by scrupulous production design and rigid, geometric framing, yet a savage, liberating wit lies beneath the surface.

| Mar 6, 2015

It's stark and chilly, with an oddly engaging death's-mask grin.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 8, 2015