Isabelle Huppert stars as Erika, an emotionally repressed piano teacher still tied to her obsessive mother (Annie Girardot) and fast approaching spinsterhood, who sees an attractive student (Benoît Magimel) as a potential player in her dark sexual fantasies. Huppert is fascinating to watch in writer-director Michael Haneke's disturbing character study based on the novel by Nobel Literature Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek.