What use do we have for faith when the world has ended?

For Anne (Isabelle Huppert), the embattled protagonist of Michael Haneke’s newest meditation on humankind’s capacity for cruelty towards itself, God is absent from the survival struggle into which she and her children are thrust after the apocalypse comes and goes. Set in an unspecified geography after an unexplained catastrophe, Time of the Wolf is at once godless and pious, its characters struggling outwardly for sustenance and inwardly for answers. Haneke seems to ask: how quickly after a disaster occurs does one begin to cope with it spiritually? Is a spiritual quest worthwhile after everything else has disintegrated? It’s a subtle theme that runs through this less-than-subtle film, and one central to current world events, in a time when our collective fate lies in the hands of irresponsible world leaders. In Haneke’s universe—one filled with depravity, depression, and defeat—how readily do his characters reach out for something else in the midst of all this?

Time of the Wolf opens much like the director’s own Funny Games (97)—an SUV makes its way across a remote road, while the family inside innocently assumes their own security. In both films, the family is thrust immediately into a waking nightmare, only the earlier film pelts the audience with violence while this one manifests its horror in scenes of pitch black night and thick fog. Which scenario is more threatening? Watching someone tie a pillowcase over your young son’s face, or seeing vast acres of empty unpopulated land in utter darkness stretching out before you? In both situations, the viewer can infer the end of the world—in Funny Games, the murderers’ ability to rewind time guarantees that their slow, methodical killing spree will last indefinitely. In Time of the Wolf, the inference is obviously much more a part of the narrative, not merely a conceptual twist. God does not make an appearance in Funny Games, though the absence of prayers during the worst scenes of torture seem to contradict Wolf’s observations on faith in times of duress, in which characters attempt to reconcile their earthly and their heavenly concerns.

God is similarly absent in the first half of Wolf, during which Anne and her children (including the homeless boy they find along the way) scrounge about for food and shelter. Anne does not pray; the children appear not to have been raised with religion, or, at least, Haneke is not interested in showing us one way or another if they had been. Spirituality, though, becomes a focal point of the film’s latter half, when Bea (Brigitte Roüan) one of the post-apocalyptic refugees taking shelter in an abandoned train station with Anne speaks about a group of demi-gods called The Just. Composed of 36 immortal men, the Just is the force that keeps the world together—when one of the 36 is destroyed, the fabric of the universe begins to unravel. Bea is calm amidst the chaos around her, calmly puffing on a cigarette during her monologue, with just a twinkle of far-away desperation in her eyes.

She’s not entirely convincing in her tranquilized fanatical proselytizing though defeat is so deeply written across her face that one can expect she’s living internally after the catastrophe. Even more suspect is her claim that Mr. Koslowski (Olivier Gourmet), the self-appointed governor of this new society, is one of the Just. A power-hungry despot, Koslowski engages in semi-consensual sex with a number of the women in the train station, offering them special protection and supplies in exchange for their subjugation. Bea’s understanding of faith, linked as it is to privilege and coercion is perverted. Perhaps this is what faith becomes in a void—currency for survival.

The other mention of a heavenly governing body in the film comes from an old man, huddled in a small group at night, oblivious to or nonplussed about the youngsters in the room. He tells his rapt audience about a group of men who sacrifice themselves in bonfires in order to keep the world right. He blames the catastrophe, essentially, on these Brothers of Fire failing to heed their sacrificial call. This explanation hits young Ben particularly hard, though we don’t realize it until he’s climactically stripping his clothes off in front of a giant fire, sparks flying outward and singeing his skin. Ben is a character left predominantly alone during the bulk of the film. In the beginning, we see him bleeding profusely from the nose, a less obvious stigmata which the director repeats throughout. This all culminates in a scene as harrowing as it is unexpected. Ben, probably 10 years old, reserved and polite, hesitantly approaches the fire, which is well-contained but ragged and burning bright. He throws in a couple of branches to feed the flames before he begins determinedly peeling off layers of clothes. It’s a desperate move, but, as Haneke repeatedly shows us throughout the film, these are the most desperate of times. Water sells for a high premium, electricity is a memory, and a transistor radio is the only contact to anyone else outside their temporary (or possibly permanent) shelter.

For Haneke, in the post-world, faith is co-opted, hiding inside desperation—a suspension of disbelief primarily focused towards some sort of ending: “I have faith that these shoes will not hurt my feet, for they are Nikes.” “I have faith that there is something better at the end of this.” “I have faith that there will be a God to explain this and make it better.” The fact that Haneke’s vision takes place practically immediately after the world ends—Anne at one point mentions that she and her children had been on the road for just a few days—might make this spiritual emptiness more easily understood. There’s a level of shellshock among Haneke’s characters, manifested in resigned silence or unexplained anger, that seems to have cast a shadow over their capacity for faith or religion. Perhaps with the emergence of a new society, spirituality will be more relevant. Religion has devolved into mythology, desperate and flailing.

But these are Haneke’s storytellers, these mythologists. Religion is founded upon the oral tradition, the passing down of myths and fact and apocrypha until they cohere into something with a central doctrine. Haneke is creating a new society and, with it, a new religion. The world is starting over, and humanity must find a new God.