La pianiste
Erika Kohut is a piano professor at a Vienna music conservatory. Although already in her forties, she still lives in an apartment with her domineering mother. Her father is a long-standing resident in a psychiatric asylum.
The audience is gradually shown truths about Erika's private life. Behind her assured façade, she is a woman whose sexual repression is manifested in a long list of paraphilia, including (but by no means limited to) voyeurism and sadomasochistic fetishes such as sexual self-mutilation.
When Erika meets Walter Klemmer, a charming 25-year-old engineering student from a middle class background, a mutual obsession develops. Even though she initially attempts to prevent consistent contact and even tries to undermine his application to the conservatory, he eventually becomes her pupil. Like her, he appreciates and is a gifted interpreter of Schumann and Schubert.
Erika destroys the musical prospects of an insecure but talented girl, Anna Schober, driven by her jealousy of the girl's contact with Walter—and also, perhaps, by her fears that Anna's life will mirror her own. She does so by hiding shards of glass inside one of Anna's coat pockets, damaging her right hand and ruining her aspirations to play at the forthcoming jubilee concert. Erika then pretends to be sympathetic when Anna's mother asks for advice on her daughter's recuperation. (The sub-plot of the pupil and her mother, mirroring the main relationship in the film, is absent in Jelinek's novel: Haneke has explained that while the novel relies on flashbacks to Erika's own childhood and her relationship with her mother, he preferred to dramatise a similar mother/daughter relationship in the present.) In a moment of dramatic irony, the girl's mother rhetorically asks Erika who could do something so evil.
Walter pursues Erika into a lavatory immediately after she has secretly ruined her pupil's hand. Walter passionately kisses Erika even though she is rebuffing him. Erika finally responds to his passion, but insists on repeatedly controlling, humiliating and frustrating Walter.
Walter is increasingly insistent in his desire to start a sexual relationship with Erika, but Erika is only willing if he will satisfy her masochistic fantasies, which repulse him. The film climaxes, however, when he attacks her in her apartment in the fashion she let him know she desired, beating and then raping her, outside her mother's bedroom door. He then leaves.
The next day, Erika takes a kitchen knife to the concert where she is scheduled to fill in for the injured Anna. She delays going to the stage because she is desperate to see Walter, but Walter enters cheerful and laughing with his family. Moments before the concert is due to start, Erika stabs herself superficially in the shoulder and exits the concert hall into the street.
pornographic, cult, psychological, cruelty