‘White Ribbon’ values questions over answers

Michael Haneke’s beautifully chilly “The White Ribbon” begins with a blank screen slowly blooming into a black-and-white image of a field, as if the lights are coming up on a stage play.

It concludes with an image slowly fading to black – returning, it seems, to the darkness of distant memory.

The story takes place in a Protestant village in pre-World War I Germany and is narrated by an elderly man (Ernest Jacobi) looking back on a disturbing few months in his youth, when he was the village schoolteacher.

In this usually quiet hamlet, inexplicable and sinister things are happening. The town doctor (Rainier Bock) is badly hurt in an accident; a barn is burned; and first one child, then another is found tortured and beaten.

Groups of children gather, eerily quiet, at the sites of these incidents; adults ponder the meaning of it. Flies and bees buzz in the sunlight. One child carefully nurtures a wounded bird; another stabs a bird with scissors.

The story is interrupted by the dawn of World War I and by the schoolteacher’s admission that he moved away “and never saw any of the villagers again.”

You think of “The Crucible” while watching this film, wondering if some strange force is at work bewitching these children.

But Haneke is less interested in answering questions than in raising them: Are children truly innocent? Does evil pass through generations? What will these children, who would be approaching middle age as Hitler began his rise to power in their country, grow up to be?

Dread hangs in the air, like those flies as they hover near a corpse; we watch mesmerized, searching for answers even as the movie’s final frame fades away.