The Preacher Man predicts that come this time next week you’ll have had enough of hearing about The White Ribbon. In the week when Roland Emmerich destroys the world (again) and Michael Caine returns to the mean streets of London in Harry Brown, the Palme d’Or winning film from Michael Haneke is going to dominate radio and tv discussions, newspaper and magazine features, not to mention all film-related pub, restaurant and dinner party debates from here to the year end. Even here at Screenrush we’ve bowed to pressure and among our usual offering of wonderful photo features and interviews on the upcoming mega-blockbusters we’re offering our lucky users the chance to win a box-set of the complete film works of this Austrian provoc-auteur!

And so, it may be assumed that this is a film that everyone is going to see. Unfortunately not.

Haneke’s last film, the French-language thriller Hidden caused a sensation amongst critics in the UK and grossed over a millions quids at the box-office, astonishing for a challenging release, let alone a foreign language one, but sadly it seems that The White Ribbon might not replicate this phenomenal success.

The reasons cinema goers, like yourselves, might avoid it is simple: in critics’ attempts to paint this film as something truly important they will invariably focus on its bleakest aspects. While most reviewers - who, at Cannes, hedged their bets, called it a masterwork but steered clear of resounding five star ratings – will refresh their original verdicts, give it full marks and embrace the film’s humanism as something rather new to Haneke’s work, they will simultaneously renew their original disclaimers that this film is not for everyone, that it’s heavy, slow, complicated and unnecessarily long.

Some of which might, and quite understandably, edge you towards the warm and reassuring misery of your local retail-park multiplex where you can collapse into a two-and-a-half-hour embrace with the none-more-soothing John Cusack as he saves the world from ancient Mayan prophecy and mahoosive waves.

But the Preacher Man is compelled to step in your way. He knows that come the day of the The White Ribbon’s release you’ll have probably have heard everything you think you can handle about Haneke’s self-reflexive scattering of knowing nods, taunting nudges, and winking stubbornness to answer the questions that his tightly structured narratives tend to pose; the importance of the setting for this complex study of a feudal Lutheran before the outbreak of the Great War; how the provocative German subtitle (Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte – A German Children’s Story) has been intentionally dropped from the English and French language releases because while Haneke didn’t mind that German people knowing that the film was about a specifically German problem, he didn’t want the rest of the world to assume it wasn’t about their problems too; and how the film’s stark austerity hardly makes its 142 minutes playing time pass in a Bourne-esque blur.

What you might not have heard or been told is that you should, without hesitation, equivocation, criticism, grumble, argument or carp:

GO. SEE. THIS. FILM.

Now, you might not know The Preacher Man - after all his name is disguised and his face is a mystery - and so, he knows you’re thinking, why should you listen to him?  The answer of course is that you shouldn’t.

His is not a closely argued critique or a vaguely enthusiastic thumbs up, and so it is not enough for him to reassure you that as the twenty-first century rolls inexorably on, even as mankind marks twenty-years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and forty years since it first stepped on the moon, it is not enough for them to simply remember their little successes but rather it’s important to commemorate, investigate, dramatise and analyse our greatest failings. Instead he hopes that you’re piqued by his assurances that this is not just the finest example of film-making skill, ability and prowess you’ll see this year but also in any other year, probably your lifetime; his guarantee that you’ll be gripped by its hinting yet haunting suggestions of the moral decay of the 20^th century; he promises you’ll be humoured and charmed as much as repulsed and terrified; he’s certain that you’ll be endlessly intrigued by the clues to the story’s essential mysteries.

But he also wants to remind you that you’re all – yes all of you - terrible, morally vacuous, aesthetically vapid and that if you’re very very lucky, if you pay your tenner and simply sit and watch this magisterial work of art it might just change the way you look at and see not only the world as-it-is around you, but also the world as-it’s-becoming, as you live in it.

And so, the Preacher Man entreats all you poor, desperate, lifeless, X-Factor watching drones:

GO. SEE. THIS. FILM.

NOW.