So a well-off French family gets a bundle on their doorstep, and it’s… a videotape of the front of their house. Two hours long, taken from across the street, nothing overtly menacing but… y’know, disquieting. More videotapes follow, along with crayon-scribbled drawings whose meaning isn’t immediately clear, but which obviously goes back to some childhood trauma of the dad’s.

And so this turns into an exploration and exhumation of the buried past that went down in his childhood, which PS it turns out is also tied to the October 1961 massacre of hundreds of Algerian protesters in Paris.

There are dramatic scenes of confrontation between basically all of the members of the cast, en route to an ending that raises more questions than it answers; the director Haneke is pretty explicit that trying to figure out who sent the tapes isn’t the point of the movie, which means that there’s presumably no answer to it worth speaking of despite this being structured as a whodunnit.

Normally, that would piss me off — if you use a puzzle box structure and don’t pay off your mysteries, I hate you — but this has enough other payoffs and resolutions that I think it still works as a movie, just as a character portrait (and allegory for historical injustice) rather than a mystery.